a en ea ne aa mens ne rn oe ee 
aa ce er i are a Site rceate = 


oars 
Senocaee 


i} , A 
it Hiiesea aah i 
an i it 

ii : My t hitit ith 


lt 
A 


HAH 
i 
HEA 


SEE <—s 
be TTS ; _ 





Spas mse Se — — ea 





WASTE ay ii 
PUA 








Tawi 


ay 
( 


SONS 
aera 


hes 


ye 
Ay 
ne. 





Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/influenceofchrisOOspra 


THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY ON 
FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN INSTITUTIONS 





ANY OF PING 


/ 






rid NOV 42 1995 
The'Bohlen Lectures, 1924 — \ Ape wv 
CLogica gwd?” 


The Influence of Chris- 
tianity on Fundamental 
Human Institutions 7 7 7 


BY / 
PHILO W. SPRAGUE 


Rector-Emeritus, St. John’s Church 
Charlestown, Mass. 





NEw YorxK CHICAGO 


Fleming H. Revell Company 


LoNDON AND EDINBURGH 


Copyright, McmMxxv, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 


Printed in the United States of America 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 





To the Members 
of 
St. John’s Church, Charlestown, Mass., 
to whom 
it has been my privilege 
to minister for 
more than foriy years, 
I lovingly dedicate 
these Lectures. 





THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP 


age) (OHN BOHLEN, who died in the city 

“N90 |e) of Philadelphia, April 26, 1874, be- 
FZ) 88 queathed to trustees a fund of One 
Hundred Thousand Dollars, to be dis- 
tributed to religious and charitable objects in 
accordance with the well-known wishes of the 
testator. 

By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the 
trustees under the will of Mr. Bohlen transferred 
and paid over to “The Rector, Churchwardens, 
and Vestrymen of the Church of the Holy Trinity, 
Philadelphia,” in trust, a sum of money for cer- 
tain designated purposes, out of which fund the 
sum of Ten Thousand Dollars was set apart for 
the endowment of The John Bohlen Lectureship, 
upon the following terms and conditions: 





The money shall be invested in good, substantial 
and safe securities, and held in trust for a fund to be 
called The John Bohlen Lectureship, and the income 
shall be applied annually to the payment of a qualified 
person, whether clergyman or layman, for the deliv- 
ery and publication of at least one hundred copies of 
two or more lecture-sermons. ‘These lectures shall 
be delivered at such time and place, in the city of 
Philadelphia, as the persons nominated to appoint the 
lecturer shall from time to time determine, giving at 


7 


8 THE FOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHI P 


least six months’ notice to the person appointed to 
deliver the same, when the same may conveniently be 
done, and in no case selecting the same person as lec- 
turer a second time within a period of five years. The 
payment shall be made to said lecturer, after the lec- 
tures have been printed and received by the trustees, 
of all the income for the year derived from said fund, 
after defraying the expense of printing the lectures 
and the other incidental expenses attending the same. 

The subject of such lectures shall be such as is 
within the terms set forth in the will of the Rev. John 
Bampton, for the delivery of what are known as the 
Bampton Lectures, at Oxford, or any other subject 
distinctly connected with or relating to the Christian 
religion. 

The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the 
month of May, or as soon thereafter as can con- 
veniently be done. by the persons who, for the time 
being, shall hold the offices of Bishop of the Protestant 
Episcopal Church of the Diocese in which is the 
Church of the Holy Trinity; the Rector of said 
Church; the Professor of Biblical Learning, the Pro- 
fessor of Systematic Divinity, and the Professor of 
Ecclesiastical History, in the Divinity School of the 
Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. 

In case either of said offices are vacant the others 
may nominate the lecturer. 


" Under this trust Rev. Philo W. Sprague, Rector- 
Emeritus of St. John’s Church, Charlestown, 
Mass., was appointed to deliver the lectures for 
the year 1924. 


Contents 


I 
THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 
CHuurcH ° 
II 
Tue INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 
FAMILY 
III 
Tue INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 
STATE 
IV 


Tue INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 
INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM . 


ON 


ON 


ON 


ON 


THE 


THE 


THE 


13 


59 


. 105 


THE 


. 149 


ii. 


j : 
Ww F abs 
: he * i ; vel vay os ¢ 
ee ; ae 4 j . =) f 


ih 
vay 





I 


THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 
ON THE CHURCH 















ou Mai 
ea ys xt ay Ley Ak 
c% ‘a ia | « ' :,) i 4 ' " ¥ is » ¥ t 
1. 46 of ey f i t A ‘eZ 7 
es rb 87 ; ‘ { / Tila be. J 
ew ‘argh xy f ‘ 7 oe ae 
no ye | % A § 
Ras 7% = a 
ae.) iw : 8): ee 
hat ) 1 : 
i i ) . 
. 1 ~ ‘ 
a r 
xl 7 ; rakes 
4 a | : ' n 
cP 4 , 
re : , 
v¢ 
: j 
; 
‘ fags 
é 4X, 4 va" ‘ / - 
‘ Z ; ' . ’ , ; ] 
4 nat ‘4 en 5 
Vad t , ale f \ 4 7 
ig te Oa ’ 
ie oh ‘ae 
ey * fa i 
z * 
Fin us 4 ' ‘ P| by iy t 
ey y ‘_: [ 
of ‘ ‘ yee 4 AA 
i i] 1 j ; << « ; 

} a st ‘ 
iy nd are ey eh 
7 ‘ ; Pica ce war | 

‘ +€ i , 











J } 
ce mA 
y } | 
1 ; 
’ 
‘ ’ i 
; 
Jake , i on 
| vos! Ly }" 
{ 
* v , 
re i 
ri A" ‘ ne ve Ae! 
i) 4 TRUSS ye, ee Pe ees 
' as WE she rath sane | 
ioe neh Re aA el ia 
4 Pia Loe ae i oh = 
’ ' u git } i Lee 5 
uf | ‘ " 
} ¥ : ‘ i 
& : i 4 val ‘ . ; 
i Af 1U i ( 
| id ») bj my id 


hi ‘ ! ; 
a MERE! GEE RP Dew it AN py ae i th 
phon ie wre lis Lea 4 willeet 5 4%y Ur pel * 
le fev 4? ar ovo ie a 






} 4 
} : 





I 
THE CHURCH 


Beet February, 1879—forty-five years ago 

&y —Phillips Brooks gave the Bohlen Lec- 

é | le * tures for that year. The lectures were 

Bes Eves written very rapidly, being begun at 

Gueines 1878, and finished February 8, 1879. 

They were written, also, at a time of great stress 

from work within and without his parish, and from 

the illness and death of his father. He, himself, 
called it “a dreadful winter.” 

Yet of all the works of Phillips Brooks these 
lectures have had the greatest influence, and are 
the most likely to survive. Had the Bohlen Lec- 
tureship produced nothing else, these lectures 
alone would have amply justified its establishment. 
They are known the world over by the title the 
author gave them: The Influence of Jesus. 

I need make no apology for following very 
closely in Phillips Brooks’s footsteps in taking as 
the subject of these lectures, The Influence of 
Christianity on Fundamental Human Institutions. 
The interpretation of Christianity which I shall 
assume is that which he assumed, as the source of 
the influence of Jesus; but I shall ask you to study 


13 





14 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


with me the workings out of this influence in that 
part of man’s life where he creates institutions. 
Very little was said or thought of this forty-five 
years ago. It was the age of individualism. The 
Gospel of Christ was thought of as for the salva- 
tion of individuals—the few men and women who 
heard it and who were elected to believe. The 
great word of Jesus that God had sent His Son 
into the world “ that the world through Him should 
be saved,” was rarely grasped in its full and rich 
implications. It is different today when men are 
looking to the Gospel, above all, for a message of 
social salvation. I am sure, therefore, that the 
inquiry will at least be timely when we ask what 
has been the influence of Christianity on these 
fundamental human _ institutions,—the Church, 
the Family,, the State and the industrial Sys- 
tem; and specially when we ask what is its in- 
fluence today, and what must be its influence in 
the future, if Christianity is to continue to assume 
its right to leadership among the religions of the 
world? 

“What is Christianity?” That is too big a 
question for us to attempt to answer. We narrow 
it by coming to its heart and asking: ‘“‘ Where lies 
the power of Christianity to influence mankind, 
and what is the character of that influence?” As 
I said a moment ago, I shall assume as my answer 
to this question the answer which Phillips Brooks 
laid down in his study of The Influence of Jesus. 


ON THE CHURCH 15 


Here are his words as they are found in the open- 
ing sentences of his first lecture: 


“TI have been led, then, to think of Christianity and 
to speak of it,—at least in these lectures,—not as a 
system of doctrine, but as a personal force, behind 
which and in which there lies one great inspiring 
idea, which it is the work of the personal force to 
impress upon the life of man, with which the per- 
sonal force is always struggling to fill mankind. The 
personal force is the nature of Jesus, full of humanity, 
full of divinity, and powerful with a love for man 
which combines in itself every element that enters 
into love of the completest kind. The inspiring idea 
is the fatherhood of God, and the childhood of every 
man to Him. Upon the race and upon the individual, 
Jesus is always bringing into more and more perfect 
revelation the certain truth that man, and every man, 
is the child of God. This is the sum of the work of 
the Incarnation.” (Influence of Jesus, p. 11.) 


Oh! the splendour and the simplicity of this 
answer! 

It will help us to realise this if we put alongside 
of it two answers to the same question, not for the 
sake of contrast but rather for the sake of illumi- 
nation. One is the answer of Professor Harnack 
in his exceedingly valuable book What Is Chris- 
tianity? On page fifty-five he tells us: 


“Tf we take a general view of Jesus’ teaching, we 
shall see that it may be grouped under three heads. 
They are each of such a nature as to contain the 
whole, and hence it can be exhibited in its entirety 
under any one of them. 


16 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


“Firstly, the kingdom of God, and its coming. 

“‘ Secondly, God the Father, and the infinite value 
of the human soul. 

“Thirdly, the higher righteousness and the com- 
mandment of love.” 


The other answer which we put alongside that 
of Phillips Brooks is that of Professor Royce in 
The Problem of Christianity. He says (page 
forty-four): 


“The idea of the spiritual community in union 
with which man is to win salvation, the idea of the 
hopeless and guilty burden of the individual when 
unaided by divine grace, the idea of the atonement, 
these are, for our purposes, the three central ideas of 
Christianity.” 


On page thirty-nine he gives us these three ideas 
in slightly expanded form: 


“We may here state this first Christian idea in our 
own words thus, namely, as the doctrine that ‘the 
salvation of the individual man is determined by some 
sort of membership in a certain spiritual community, 
—a religious community and in its inmost nature, a 
divine community, in whose life the Christian virtues 
are to make their highest expression and the spirit of 
the Master is to obtain its earthly fulfilment.’ 

“The second of our three ideas can be stated thus: 
‘The individual human being is by nature subject to 
some overwhelming moral burden from which, if un- 
aided, he cannot escape.” (Problem of Christian- 
ity, p. 41.) 


ON THE CHURCH 17 


“The third leading idea of Christianity . . is 
the idea expressed by the assertion: The only escape 
for the individual, the only Union with the divine 
spiritual Community which he can obtain, is provided 
by the divine plan for the redemption of mankind. 
And this plan is one which includes an Atonement 
for the sins and for the guilt of mankind.” (Problem 
of Christianity, p. 43.) 


We may not stop to compare these three defini- 
tions of Christianity. Each complements the 
others. Each brings out some side of the others. 
It is good for us to have all of these in mind in 
these lectures. But as we study the influence of 
Christianity on the life of man as manifested in the 
institutions which he creates, I am sure the defini- 
tion which will help us most is that of Phillips 
Brooks. Through the Christian ages that which 
has most moved the heart of man, has most given 
him life, and the great gift of Christ to the world 
is life—‘ I am come that they might have life and 
that they might have it more abundantly ”—has 
been the message of God’s love for men manifested 
in and by Jesus Christ. But this is not the love 
of a maker for the thing he has made, or the love 
of an infinitely higher being for some living thing 
on which he has wrought good, and which, though 
infinitely below him, can recognise his love and in 
some degree respond to it. It is the love of a 
father for his child, made in his likeness and par- 
taker of his nature. It is this that moves men and 


18 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


fills them with the life that is eternal. And when 
men, filled with this new life, come back to their 
institutions and reshape them, it is the other side 
of this truth that possesses their minds and modi- 
fies all their rebuilding and remoulding. And that 
other side is the thought that if God is our Father 
we are His children. There stands out the dignity 
and the worth of man and every child of man. 

We err if we claim, with sadly misplaced arro- 
gance, that this is peculiar to Christianity. But 
we make no mistake in claiming that the emphasis 
placed on this fact is distinctive of Christianity. 

Thus it has given us two marked characteristics 
of Christian life and institutions; one is the thought 
of continued progress toward perfection, the other 
the final test of any and all human institutions. 

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said one 
word which must have staggered those who heard 
Him-——‘ Be ye therefore perfect, even as your 
Father in Heaven is perfect.” He set perfection, 
nothing less, before them as their aim. 

Now there is a perfection which is comparatively 
easy of attainment. It is easy to make a perfect 
. chair, or to do a sum in arithmetic perfectly, or to 
be perfectly on time for an appointment. One may 
be said to be perfectly strong if he has attained the 
utmost degree of strength within the range of his 
individual possibilities. But here is a perfection 
demanded which seems to transcend all human pos- 
sibilities, the perfection of God: “ Be perfect as 


ON THE CHURCH 19 


God is perfect.” This is what the disciples of 
Christ must always strive for. Realising that they 
are by nature God’s children, they are called upon 
to be, in deed and truth, God’s children, thinking 
the thoughts, saying the words, doing the deeds of 
God’s children; never counting themselves to have 
apprehended but ever pressing “ toward the mark 
of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” 

And that this thought applies equally to human 
institutions is seen in what Christ gives us as the 
final test of all institutions. 

Probably no institution was ever more sacred to 
a people than the Sabbath to the Jews of Christ’s 
day. Yet St. Mark tells us of the bitter opposition 
which Jesus aroused by again and again doing what 
the religious leaders taught was unlawful to do on 
the Sabbath day. The answer of Jesus to their 
complaints goes to the heart of man’s relation to © 
all institutions: —‘‘ The sabbath was made for man 
and not man for the sabbath: so that the Son of 
man is lord even of the sabbath.” That is the final 
test of every institution, the institution is made for 
man and not man for the institution. And the 
underlying reason for that is, that man is the child 
of God. He is in the world as in a mansion of the 
Father’s house. His is the freedom of a child. His 
is the responsibility of a child. His are the high 
privileges and his the unceasing duties of a child. 
This is what Paul meant when he cried to the little 
band of disciples at Corinth: ‘All things are 


20 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or 
the world, or life, or death, or things present, or 
things to come; all are yours; and ye are Christ’s; 
and Christ is God’s.” : 

We begin our inquiry by trying to find what 
has been the influence of Christianity on that 
fundamental institution which we call ‘“ The 
Church.” 

We must make no mistake as to what is meant 
when we speak of the Church as a human institu- 
tion. Often a distinction is made between the 
Church and other institutions, and the Church is 
spoken of as being a divine institution, while the 
family and the state are called human _ insti- 
tutions. We make no such distinction here. There 
is a sense in which the Church may properly be 
called a divine institution. But so also are the 
family and the state divine institutions. And in 
the same sense in which the family and the state 
may be called human institutions may the Church 
be called a human institution. 

For we must remember that the Church, as an 
institution, is not confined to Christianity. The 
word itself is, of course, of Christian origin. But 
that for which the word stands is as broad in 
its origin as the religious consciousness of man. 
Wherever man has caught a vision of God there 
he has instituted a church to make others see that 
vision. The rude savage with his totem institutes 
his church to keep alive the worship of his god. 


ON THE CHURCH 21 


When Elijah gathered all Israel on Mount Carmel, 
that they might choose whether they would wor- 
ship Baal or Jehovah, he said that the prophets of 
Baal were four hundred and fifty and the prophets 
of the Asherah were four hundred. That repre- 
sents a great establishment, a church widely and 
firmly instituted. When Cortez came to Mexico 
he found among the Aztecs a great and firmly es- 
tablished organisation for the carrying on and 
perpetuating of religion. Five thousand priests 
were said to have been attached to the principal 
temple in the capital. Their ranks and duties were 
carefully defined. Those expert in music took 
charge of the choirs. Others arranged the festi- 
vals. Others took charge of the education of the 
young. To the highest were reserved the horrible 
rites connected with their human sacrifices. (Pres- 
cott’s Conquest of Mexico, Vol. I, p. 66.) 

So with Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and al- 
most every other form of religion. Man being in- 
curably religious is forever creating institutions to 
perpetuate and propagate religion. And so it was 
with the truth of God which Jesus gave men. The 
origin of the Christian Church was as natural as 
the growth of a plant from a seed, or the formation 
of a great political party to propagate and realise 
the principles for which that party stands. As 
Huxley has told us, it is always life which begets 
the organism and not the organism which begets 
life. How suggestive is the figure which St. Paul 


22 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


has given us when he says that the Church is the 
body of Christ. In the Church Christ lives and 
through the Church Christ works. We must look, 
therefore, to find that great message which Christ 
gave men expressed in the life and teachings of the 
Christian Church. 

That which differentiates the Christian Church 
is in the special message which she gives the world 
—the message that God is our Father, and we are 
God’s children. 

But it lies, also, in another fact. 

As we read the four Gospels we find that the 
word “church” was almost never used by Jesus. 
Instead the word which was most frequently upon 
His lips was the “‘ Kingdom of God.” He went 
everywhere preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom. 
His parables have to do with the Kingdom of God. 
He taught His disciples to pray for the Kingdom 
of God. He sent the apostles and then the seventy 
to go before His face and tell men that the King- 
dom of God was at hand. Here is the seed which 
developed into the Christian Church. But the 
Kingdom of God, the establishment of which was 
the work of the Church, and the Church were never 
made identical in the teachings of the Master. It 
would have been impossible for Him to do so, just 
as it would have been impossible for Him, working 
at His carpenter’s bench, to have identified the tool 
with which He was working and the work He was 
doing; or for Him to have identified the body in 


ON THE CHURCH 23 


which and through which He walked and worked 
among men with His own personality. 

The story of Christianity is the story of the rela- 
tion between the Church and the Kingdom of God, 
and the perpetual struggle to make that relation 
what the Master made it. It is the story of 
mingled failures and successes; of times when the 
right relation would seem to have been lost, and 
men have said the Church exists for her own sake: 
she is an end in herself; man’s work is to establish 
the Church everywhere; the Church is the King- 
dom of God, when the Church is established the 
Kingdom of God has come. And again there have 
been times when the difference between the two 
has been realised, but the purpose for which the 
Church exists has been lost sight of; and the 
Church has been content to pray “‘ Thy Kingdom 
come,” without raising a hand to help in the estab- 
lishment of that Kingdom, leaving her sacred task 
to those who were not the children of the Kingdom. 
And there have been times, too, when the Church 
has caught a vision of that for which she exists, 
and with heart.and soul has set herself to fulfil her 
mission and bring in the Kingdom of God. But,— 
and this is the suggestive thing, the thing that fills 
us with hope, the thing that makes us say in our 
creed, “‘ I believe in the Holy Catholic Church ”— 
there is the unquestionable fact that more than any 
other church which the faith of man has instituted 
the Christian Church has persisted in the task of 


24 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


bringing in the Kingdom of God; and today, after 
nearly two thousand years of life, she stands out in 
the world understanding her mission better, and 
more earnest to accomplish it than ever before. 

But what did Jesus mean when He spoke of the 
Kingdom of God? Scholars have been very busy 
of late trying to answer this question. They have 
called attention to the fact that the phrase was not 
original with Jesus but was in common use in the 
Master’s time, and they have devoted themselves 
with meticulous study to find how much the 
thought of Jesus and His teachings about the King- 
dom were influenced by those of the accepted re- 
ligious teachers of the day. Such inquiries are 
absolutely in place, and necessary, and the results 
attained are of priceless value. But they do not 
come within the scope of these lectures. The fact 
is, every open-minded student of the New Testa- 
ment has a pretty definite view of what Jesus 
meant by the Kingdom of God. 

It is plain that in the mind of Jesus the Kingdom 
of God begins with the individual. ‘‘ Except one 
be born anew he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” 
The Kingdom of God is spiritual, coming not with 
observation. It begins in a man when he ceases to 
think that he is in the world to do his own will, but 
comes to know that he is here to do the will of God. 

When a man, then, gives up his obedience to the 
lusts of the flesh and lives a pure, clean life, remem- 
bering that his body is the temple of the Holy 


ON THE CHURCH 25 


Ghost, he enters into the Kingdom of God. When 
he gives up his pride and arrogance and becomes 
meek and lowly after the pattern of the Master, he 
enters the Kingdom of God. When the rich man 
gives up his mad pursuit of wealth and organises 
his business with the distinct purpose of enriching 
others instead of merely himself, he enters the 
Kingdom of God. When the woman of society, 
whose frivolous life knows as its only purpose the 
gratification of her vanity, her love of ease and 
luxury, her whims and caprices, feels the touch of 
Christ upon her heart and gives her life to His 
service among men, she enters into the Kingdom 
of God. Wherever the spirit of God takes posses- 
sion of man there is the Kingdom of God. And 
that kingdom never ceases to grow and expand 
till it brings even the very thoughts into captivity 
to the obedience of Christ. 

But though the Kingdom of God begins with 
the individual we are not to think of it as stop- 
ping there. The parables of Jesus are full of the 
thought of its expanding power. He compares it 
to light, to salt, to the growing seed, to leaven. 
These imply more than its growth in the heart and 
life of the individual. It is to enter, and permeate, 
and influence, and enlarge, and uplift, and spirit- 
ualise the whole sphere of man’s life. And the 
results of this are just as concrete and definite as 
in the life of the individual. 

Thus, when the message of Christianity comes 


26 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


to a tribe where cannibalism prevails, and the tribe 
abandons its cannibalism, the Kingdom of God 
comes. When the message comes to a people who 
for centuries have been tormented with the hard 
and cruel institutions of caste, and they abandon 
caste, and come to recognise that God has made 
of one blood all nations to dwell on the face of the 
whole earth, it is a coming of the Kingdom of God. 
Where slavery prevails, when the slave’s shackles 
are broken, and the slave stands forth no longer a 
thing but a person, then the Kingdom of God comes 
in. Where a whole people, numbering more than 
one hundred million souls, say of a traffic that for 
centuries has wrought untold misery to the human 
race, slaying multitudes outright, sending multi- 
tudes to insane asylums and still larger multitudes 
to prison, begetting crime, disease and death,— 
“We will no longer have this traffic among us: 
though many of us may not feel the danger for 
ourselves, though for many it may be harmless, yet 
for the sake of the multitudes to whom it will mean 
ruin of body and soul, we will not have it among 
us,’’—it is a coming of the Kingdom of God. And 
when the nations of the world shall cease to learn 
war any more, beating their swords into plough- 
shares and their spears into pruning hooks, surely 
that will be a coming of the Kingdom of God. 
Now my contention here is, that the special in- 
fluence of Christianity upon the Church lies in 
laying upon the Church as her special task this 


ON THE CHURCH 27 


building up of the Kingdom of God alike in indi- 
viduals and in human institutions; and also that 
in spite of all failures and shortcomings, all blun- 
ders and mistakes, all sins of commission and omis- 
sion, the Christian Church has recognised this as 
her task; and, furthermore, that that by which all 
the successes or failures of the Christian Church 
are to be judged is, how truly and adequately, in 
doctrine and in life she has interpreted to men the 
central truth of Christianity, viz., Christ’s word 
that God is our father and we are His children. 

Often the best way to discover the true character 
of a man lies through noting his mistakes, the mis- 
takes, that is, which he himself recognises as 
mistakes, struggles against, and corrects. 

Let us do this in the case of the Christian 
Church. I want to ask you to think with me of 
some mistakes of the Christian Church. All of 
them have been of such a nature that unless recog- 
nised and corrected they would inevitably not only 
have brought to naught the purpose for which the 
Church exists, but have destroyed the Church 
itself. Yet all of them spring so naturally from 
the heart of man that the Church is tempted to 
make them today. 

The first of these is the struggle for temporal 
power. 

How Christ Himself felt this is shown in the 
story of His third temptation. “ All these will I 
give thee,” said the tempter, “if thou wilt fall down 


28 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


and worship me.” Here the essence of the tempta- 
tion does not lie merely in the offer of the kingdoms 
of the world. The soul of Christ was above that. 
But would it not be possible to gain the kingdoms 
of the world and then make them the kingdoms 
of God? 

Let me ask you to take two pages from the 
history of the Christian Church. They tell the 
story of two scenes so memorable they have 
stamped themselves upon the minds of men for 
all time. 

The first is the story of St. Ambrose and the 
Emperor Theodosius, in the year 390 A. D. 

Theodosius was a Christian whose religion had 
gone beneath the surface, but he was a man of 
choleric temperament, liable to be swept from his 
base by storms of passion. On one occasion he 
had thus transgressed. The populace of Thessa- 
lonica had justly incurred his anger. The com- 
mander of the Emperor’s forces had arrested, for 
an infamous crime, a charioteer dear to their heart, 
and when they demanded his release they had 
brutally murdered the commander and a number 
of his officers. When the facts came to the knowl- 
edge of the Emperor his anger knew no bounds. 
In vain Ambrose sought to moderate his wrath. 
The Emperor dissembled with him, and gave orders 
that the people of Thessalonica should be mas- 
sacred till at least seven thousand had _ fallen. 
Though he afterwards tried to countermand the 


ON THE CHURCH 29 


order, it was carried out and the tale more than 
completed. 

When the news came to Ambrose, he was over- 
whelmed with grief. It was a sin for which Theo- 
dosius must atone. He refused to admit the 
Emperor into the church, and when Theodosius 
appeared demanding admission Ambrose met him 
at the church gate, “ took hold of his purple robe 
and said in the hearing of all the people, ‘ Stand 
back! How dare you lift up in prayer hands 
steeped in the blood of innocents? How receive in 
such hands the most sacred body of our Lord? 
Depart and repent. Submit to the bonds of dis- 
cipline, the bonds which alone can restore you to 
health.’”? Theodosius submitted, but it was only 
after eight months of tears and repentance, a re- 
pentance shown to be sincere by his issuing an 
edict forbidding any sentence of death to be car- 
ried out till at least thirty days had elapsed after 
it had been issued, that he was received once more 
into the communion of the Church. (Mahan’s 
Church History, p. 502.) 

This is a page in the history of the Church of 
which every one who loves the Church may be 
proud. It is a splendid instance of the victory of 
the spiritual over the natural. Would God that in 
every age there were more bishops with courage to 
speak the truth of God to those in high places as 
did St. Ambrose! 

The other page is even more striking and famil- 


30 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


iar. It tells of the winter of 1077, seven hundred 
years later, when the age-long struggle between 
Church and state for temporal power is culminating 
in the fierce battle between the Emperor Henry IV, 
and the mighty Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII. 
Now the pope has the upper hand and he uses it. 
With infinite pain the excommunicated Emperor 
has crossed the Alps to gain admission to the Pope 
and make his submission. Gregory awaits his 
coming at Canossa. At first he refuses even to see 
Henry, but at last, at the entreaties of his friends, 
admits him so far as the second of the three walls 
of the castle. There in the coarse, woolen garb of 
a penitent, with bare feet, without food, in the 
piercing cold he was compelled to wait for three 
days till, almost exhausted, he was admitted to the 
presence of the pope, to listen to the hard terms 
accorded him. (Robertson’s History of the Chris- 
tian Church, Vol. IV, p. 323.) 

It is very easy to misinterpret this scene in one 
direction or another. Some see in it once more the 
heroic struggle of the spiritual to master the 
natural, as in the case of Ambrose and Theodosius. 
Others see in it merely the pride and arrogance of 
the hierarchy bent on gaining temporal power for 
its own advantage. No doubt there is something 
of both of these. The mingled good and evil of 
our human nature manifest themselves as con- 
spicuously as anywhere else in all history in that 
feud which went on for centuries between popes 


ON THE CHURCH 31 


and emperors for the domination of Christendom. 
But the essence of the mistake lies in the fact that 
the Church has for the time forgotten that because 
man is God’s child every side of his life has its 
legitimacy, the secular as well as the religious; 
that the powers that be of the state, just as much 
as the powers that be of the Church, are ordained 
of God; that the work of the Church is not to usurp 
the powers, still less the methods of the state, but 
to bring the Kingdom of God into the hearts and 
lives of men alike in Church and state. 

(2) The next great mistake of the Christian 
Church was in its attitude toward the human body. 

Paul had said ‘‘ Your bodies are the temples of 
the Holy Ghost.” But unfortunately, owing to 
his belief that the end of the world was near at 
hand, he had also said a number of things which 
discouraged marriage. Evidently even in apos- 
tolic times some in the church were beginning to 
make the fatal mistake of teaching that celibacy 
was a higher estate than wedlock; for Paul, in one 
of his letters, toward the end of his life, speaks of 
those forbidding to marry as among those who de- 
parted from the faith. (I Tim. iv: 3.) 

But the seed was there. It was fostered by the 
gross licentiousness of the times. Men, taught in 
the Christian Church temperance, soberness, and 
chastity, but living in a world where the bodies of 
men were used for every form of uncleanness, 
where the indulgence of the lusts of the flesh was 





OZ THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


considered as natural as eating and drinking, could 
easily come to think that the evil lay in the body 
itself, and that the bounden duty of every fol- 
lower of Christ was not only to subdue the body 
and keep it in subjection, but to despise the body, 
and find no place for it in the Kingdom of God. 

It was not a new thought to the religious mind, 
nor was the extent to which it was carried in the 
Christian Church peculiar to Christianity. But we 
make no mistake in affirming that the mistake was 
less excusable in the Christian Church because the 
Christian Church was at that very time profoundly 
studying the central faith of her teaching,—the 
incarnation of God in man. 

It is very interesting to watch the results of this 
mistake in the attitude of the Church toward the 
celibacy of the clergy. We can see this step by 
step in the Canon Law. The story as told by Lea 
in his History of Sacerdotal Celibacy is fascinating 
to the last degree, but it is the story of a crime, a 
crime against human nature, a crime that has been 
the fruitful mother of crimes. In her anxiety to 
enforce celibacy the Church even sank so low as 
to tolerate concubinage, and licenses were even 
granted to the clergy to keep concubines, provided 
they would not marry. 

But worse, because they were more widely ex- 
tended, were the results of this false teaching about 
the body on the minds of Christian people. It 
pronounced shameful that which God had made 


ON THE CHURCH ae 


necessary for the continuance of the human race. 
It degraded women till the highest ideal of saint 
was one who had never even looked upon his 
mother’s face. The Lives of the Saints, which were 
handed down from generation to generation, form- 
ing the ideals and shaping the lives and characters 
of men, tell with unbounded admiration of St. 
Theodosius who refused even to see his mother, 
though she came with letters from Bishops; of St. 
Marcus who was clever enough to circumvent the 
command of his Abbot to grant his mother an in- 
terview, and went to her with his face disguised 
and his eyes shut, so that the mother did not recog- 
nise the son, and the son did not see the mother; 
of St. Poemen and his six brothers who had left 
their mother to lead the ascetic life; and when, 
beset with infirmities, she came alone to the desert 
of Egypt to see them they ran back to their cells 
and closed the door in her face. So unholy was 
the human body become to the diseased mind of 
the day that even to see one’s own body was a 
pollution, and they were considered most holy 
whose bodies were allowed to become most filthy. 
(Lecky’s History of European Morals, Vol. Il, 
pp. 109, 128.) 

It is good that the Church, holding fast to the 
central faith of the incarnation, has come in a large 
degree to recognise the error in such teaching. 
But we must go a step farther than this. We must 
come to recognise the fact that as man is the child 


34 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


of God there is a sacredness that belongs to the 
birth of a child of God, and to every step in the 
process by which that birth is brought about. May 
it not be possible for those who find it against their 
conscience to say the article in the creed that 
affirms that Jesus Christ was ‘‘ conceived of the 
Holy Ghost,” because they are no longer able to 
believe in it as a statement of physical fact, to be 
glad to accept a spiritual interpretation of it, affirm- 
ing that the conception of Jesus was a holy con- 
ception, the type of what the conception of every 
child should bee 

(3) But worse than the mistake of the Church in 
her attitude toward the body of man, was her 
attitude toward man’s mind. 

I shall not dwell on this here because this error 
is a very present one, and I must speak of it at 
some length later on. But something must be 
here noted. 

Note, first, the attitude of our Master toward 
truth. In all His teachings nothing is more sug- 
gestive and beautiful. Take a few of His words. 
This, first, from the Sermon on the Mount: “ Ye 
have heard that it hath been said by them of old 
time, . . . but I say unto you.” Thus He pre- 
pared His disciples for new visions of truth and 
new interpretations of duty. Take next His words 
to Pontius Pilate asking him “ Art thou a king, 
then?” “Thou sayest that I am a king,” He 
answers. ‘“‘ To this end was I born, and to this 


ON THE CHURCH 35 


end came I into the world, that I should bear wit- 
ness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth 
heareth my voice.” There was in the mind of 
Jesus the absolute certainty that God who had 
spoken through the prophets was there and then 
speaking through Him—God’s Son. But His 
disciples, too, were God’s children. God would 
speak, too, in and through them. So He tells them 
of the great gift that is to come to them to accom- 
plish His perpetual presence among them: “ The 
Comforter, whom I will send unto you from the 
Father, even the Spirit of truth which proceedeth 
from the Father.”” ‘‘ When he, the Spirit of truth 
is come, he shall guide you into all the truth.” So 
sacred was the use of the mind to Jesus that He 
made it enter into the first, and great command- 
ment, and men were to love God with all their 
mind just as much as with all their soul and all 
their strength. 

They were evil days when the Church of God 
forgot this, and the free exercise of the mind out- 
side the beaten track in matters of science, medi- 
cine or religion was considered an unholy thing, 
exposing any man who dared to think for himself 
to obloquy, to torture and to death. The world 
has suffered incalculable loss by this mistake. It 
is a mistake from which the Church has not yet 
altogether escaped. 

(4) The last mistake of the Church of which I 
want to speak is in its teaching concerning Hell. 


36 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


Christ said,—the words are among the most 
significant He ever uttered—‘ What man is there 
of you, who, if his son shall ask bread, will he 
give him a stone, or if he ask a fish, will he give 
him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how 
to give good gifts unto your children, how much 
more shall your Father which is in heaven give 
good things to them that ask him?” The force 
of Christ’s appeal lies in the fact that men are 
God’s children. Christ reasons from the nature 
of the child to the nature of the Father. If men 
have goodness, kindness, love in their hearts, how 
much more must God! Oh! the infinite comfort 
contained in those three words of Jesus, ‘“‘ how 
much more.”’ The prophet of old had told us that 
as the heavens are higher than the earth so are 
God’s ways higher than man’s ways and God’s 
thoughts than man’s thoughts. Jesus makes us 
realise that all there is in man, God’s child, of pity, 
of compassion, of forgiveness, of love that binds up 
wounds, and heals and rescues and saves, is only a 
faint adumbration of the love and compassion, the 
forgiving heart, and healing power of God—man’s 
Father. 

Would anyone believe that the time would ever 
come when in the Christian Church this same 
process should be used to vilify God and degrade 
Him as far below man as Christ exalted Him above 
man? And yet this is precisely what took place. 
Men looked into their own nature and found there 


ON THE CHURCH 37 


hate, cruelty, self-will, the heart that refuses to 
forget or forgive, the anger that will not be ap- 
peased; and they projected these into the nature 
of God, and then magnified them to correspond 
with the greatness of God. 

It is in vain to try to explain the horrible teach- 
ing of the Church as to the future punishment of 
the wicked, as the desire of man to vindicate the 
holiness of God. We cannot conceive of any 
offence so great that it should deserve the eternal 
punishment of Hell. Nor can we conceive of a 
human being so absolutely lost to any sense of the 
suffering of others, so implacable, so stony-hearted, 
that he would spend eternity devising ever new 
torments to inflict upon the object of his hate; and 
yet this is just what the teaching of the Church 
about Hell imputed to God. 

Nor are we to think that any branch of the 
Christian Church—ancient, medizval, or modern, 
Catholic or Protestant—has been free from this 
sacrilege. Dante epitomises the spirit and teach- 
ings of the Church for a thousand years; and in 
the Inferno he gives us, in exquisite poetry, what 
men had come to believe was the punishment meted 
out to sinners hereafter. But this lurid picture 
was, in some degree at least, alleviated by the hope 
of final release to some through the healing fires 
of purgatory. But to the horrors of hell as por- 
trayed in the plain, robust, and vigourous prose of 
many Protestant preachers there is no such relief. 


38 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


In his famous chapter entitled An Examination of 
the Scotch Intellect During the Seventeenth Cen- 
tury, Buckle gives us in his History of Civilisation 
a summary of the teaching common in Scotch pul- 
pits at that time. (Opus. cit., Vol. 2, p. 293.) 


“ All over Scotland,” he says, “the sermons were, 
with hardly an exception, formed after the same plan, 
and directed to the same end. To excite fear was the 
paramount object. The clergy boasted that it was 
their special mission to thunder out the wrath and 
curses of the Lord. In their eyes, the Deity was not 
a beneficent being, but a cruel and remorseless tyrant. 
They declared that all mankind, a very small portion 
only excepted, were doomed to eternal misery. And 
when they came to describe what that misery was, 
their dark imaginations revelled and gloated at the 
prospect. They delighted in telling their hearers that 
they would be scorched in great fires, and hung up by 
their tongues. They were to be lashed with scor- 
pions, and see their companions writhing and howling 
around them. They were to be thrown into boiling 
oil and scalding lead. A river of fire and brimstone, 
broader than the earth, was prepared for them; in 
that they were to be immersed; their bones, their 
lungs, and their liver, were to boil, but never be con- 
sumed. At the same time worms were to prey upon 
them; and while these were gnawing at their bodies, 
they were to be surrounded by devils, mocking and 
making pastime of their pains. Such were the first 
stages of suffering, and they were only the first. For 
the torture, besides being unceasing, was to become 
gradually worse. So refined was the cruelty, that one 
hell was succeeded by another; and, lest the sufferer 


ON THE CHURCH 39 


should grow callous, he was, after a time, moved on, 
that he might undergo fresh agonies in fresh places, 
provision being made that the torment should not pall 
on the sense, but should be varied in its character, as 
well as eternal in its duration.” 


And in a footnote Buckle adds: 


“Tt is with pain that I transcribe the following im- 
pious passage, ‘Consider, who is the contriver of 
these torments. There have been some very exquisite 
torments contrived by the wit of men, the naming of 
which, if ye understood their nature, were enough to 
fill your hearts with horror; but all these fall as far 
short of the torments ye are to endure, as the wisdom 
of man falls short of that of God.’” 


It may seem strange that I have thus dwelt on 
the mistakes of the Christian Church. It has not 
been a pleasant task; but the retrospect is exceed- 
ingly wholesome. The mistakes I have spoken of 
are not so much the mistakes of the Church as of 
our human nature from which the central truth of 
Christianity has been slowly delivering us; mis- 
takes from which only that truth can deliver us. 
Take them one by one as we have spoken of them; 
the mistake of thinking that what we call the secu- 
lar, which God has made a necessary part of man’s 
life, has not a legitimacy in man’s life as well as 
that we call religious; the mistake of forgetting 
that the body of man is sacred just as the soul of 
man is sacred; the mistake of thinking that the 


40 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


mind of man is not given to use, to use freely, to 
use to the uttermost; the mistake of thinking that 
the heart of man is not right when it looks upon 
its own dictates for love, for compassion, for for- 
giveness as sure indications of the heart of God; — 
what has set men aright in these sad mistakes, 
common to men outside and inside the Church, but 
the great message of Christ that because man is the 
child of God his whole life and his whole nature 
are sacred. It is in convincing the heart of the 
Church of this that the influence of Christianity 
on the Church has conspicuously shown itself. 

I want to speak, now, of some ways in which the 
central truth of Christianity must influence the 
Christian Church today, and in all time to come. 

(1) It must lead the Church to believe in herself 
more as the living Church of the living God. 

The men of today are God’s children, and the 
men of tomorrow will be God’s children, just as 
much as the men of yesterday were God’s children. 

God is the living God; just as much living this 
instant as in any instant in all eternity. And 
because living, working, creating, sustaining, re- 
vealing, redeeming. 

We were brought up to think differently. When, 
for example, we said the words of the creed, “I 
believe in God the Father almighty, maker of 
heaven and earth,” we were taught that God made 
the heavens and the earth once for all, that He 
made them in just six days, that He made them 


ON THE CHURCH 41 


just four thousand and four years before Christ. 
But geology and astronomy have made us see that 
the heavens and the earth are still in the process 
of making; that in every moment of time God has 
been the maker of heaven and earth; and that he 
is making the heavens and the earth at this moment 
of time as actually as in any moment of eternity. 

As with God the creator so with God the 
revealer. 

How sublime are the words the Bible gives us 
as the first recorded words of God:—‘ And God 
said, Let there be light, and there was light.” 
They are words that give us the inmost heart of 
God; as St. John tells us, “ God zs light.” 

But most of us were not taught that when we 
were children. There was a book, and in that book 
was contained a revelation made to man by God, 
and outside of what was contained in that book 
there was nothing revealed to man, and beyond 
what was in that book there never could be any- 
thing revealed to man. 

I am not questioning the reality of revelation; 
but affirming it positively and dogmatically when- 
ever and wherever it is found, just as positively 
for the year of grace 1924, or for the year 19024 
as for the year when it first came through inspired 
apostles. 

Nor am I questioning the unique value of the 
revelation which has come to us through the Bible. 
For one reason it has stood the test of time, and of 


42 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


human experience, and of examination and re- 
examination. But this may show itself true here- 
after just as well of truth that may be in process 
of being revealed to men today. 

Nor am I forgetting the appeal that Christianity 
makes to us as historic, with its deep roots in the 
past. But all history is not yet written. How 
short and imperfect is the story as yet written of 
man’s life on this planet and of what he has come 
to believe of God! 

Men talk—how easy it is to talk!—of the 
Catholic faith; and in the good old days when 
some of us were studying for the ministry and 
asked “‘ What is the Catholic faith? ”, how satisfy- 
ing to us at the time was the answer given in the 
rule of good Vincentius of Lerins:—‘‘ The Catho- 
lic faith is that which has been believed every- 
where, always, by all ””—Ouod ubique, quod sem- 
per, quod ab omnibus. But Vincentius died in or 
about the year 450 a. p. Even to us who live less 
than fifteen hundred years later, can those four 
hundred and fifty years possibly be construed to 
mean “always”? Can the small portion of the 
world that had then even heard of Christ possibly 
be construed to mean ‘‘ everywhere’? Can the 
small number of those who at that time believed in 
Christ possibly be construed to mean “ All men,” 
so that the sublime word ‘‘ Catholic ” can be arro- 
gated for the faith of those who believe as he did? 

The pith of this matter lies in two words and 


ON THE CHURCH 43 


their relation to each other, “ the faith ” and “ the 
truth.” 

If the Church is to reach men of intellectual in- 
tegrity, and as there is no higher virtue so there 
can be no class of men-it is more important the 
Church should reach, she must make it felt that 
man’s supreme loyalty is due not to the faith but 
to the truth; that she holds the faith, not because 
it is “ the faith,” but because it embodies the truth. 
But as man’s vision of truth broadens and deepens 
though truth remains ever the same, so the faith 
which man holds and by which he lives broadens 
and deepens with his apprehension of the truth 
which is at the heart of his faith. 

There is a conception of “the faith” which 
holds men hopelessly mortgaged to the past. The 
only thing that can release men from the tyranny 
of that mortgage is absolute loyalty to the truth. 

There is a continuity of life and thought in the 
Church that is of inestimable value. But that value 
is lost unless both life and thought are continuous. 

“The God of our fathers.” The heart of man 
leaps up to meet the thought. But “ from ever- 
lasting to everlasting thou art God.” The Church 
needs to stress that second “ everlasting,” that men 
may realise that the God who spoke to our fathers 
is now speaking to us and will speak to our chil- 
dren and our children’s children to the end of time. 

All this applies as well to duty as to truth. Are 
we to accept unquestioningly the standards of right 


44 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


and wrong which our forebears accepted? ‘‘ This 
is the tradition of the elders. Our fathers thought 
this right, therefore it is right. Our mothers taught 
us this was wrong, therefore it is wrong.” Such 
teaching will not carry much weight with young 
people today; perhaps less than it should. But in 
the main the young people are right. We shall 
realise it if we keep ever in mind that they, as we 
and as our fathers, are God’s children to whom 
the Heavenly Father reveals His will. What the 
Church preeminently needs today is men in the 
ministry who will dare always to remember that 
they are called to be living men, in the living 
Church of the living God. 

(2) While thus learning to believe more vitally in 
herself, the Christian Church must learn to assume 
a less arrogant attitude toward those of other forms 
of religion; and for the same reason. If we are 
God’s children as well as our fathers, so too are 
those who are not called by the name of Christ 
God’s children, as well as we. If God speaks to us 
as to His children so He has spoken and is speaking 
to them as His children just as to us. 

It was a critical time in the history of the Chris- 
tian Church when Peter, in the house of Cornelius, 
dared to say, “ Of a truth I perceive that God is no 
respecter of persons: but in every nation he that 
feareth him and worketh righteousness is accept- 
able to him,” and the great-hearted response of the 
Church was “ Then to the Gentiles also hath God 


ON THE CHURCH 45 


granted repentance unto life.” The call of the 
Gentiles was such a revolutionary shock that it 
almost destroyed the Church; but it was the spasm 
of a new birth. 

In her attitude toward the non-Christian world 
the Christian Church has always been and is today 
altogether too arrogant. Our attitude is: “ God 
has spoken to us. Come, sit at our feet and learn 
what God has revealed to us.” But we fail to add 
even in our thoughts: ‘‘ God has spoken to you as 
well as to us. Let us also sit at your feet and 
learn what God has revealed to you.” 

Has not the time come for the Christian Church 
to reverse this attitude, and to do so openly and 
avowedly, of express intention and set purpose? 

In my own communion, for example, a begin- 
ning may easily be made by introducing in’ the 
public worship along with the reading from the 
Scriptures occasional readings from other writings 
than the Bible, with the word of introduction which 
shall make the meaning of the reading as well as 
of what is read, perfectly plain. One may have the 
greatest appreciation of the value of the Holy 
Scriptures and yet find the use of certain parts of 
the Holy Scriptures far from edifying as part of 
the public worship of a Christian congregation. 
No intoning of priest and choir can make the clos- 
ing words of the one hundred and thirty-seventh 
Psalm anything else but a horrible curse, abso- 
lutely unfit for Christian worship: “O daughter 


46 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


of Babylon, wasted with misery; yea, happy shall 
he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. 
Blessed shall he be that taketh thy children and 
throweth them against the stones.” Nor will any 
mumbling of the minister make the story of Korah, 
Dathan and Abiram, which still stands as the 
Prayer-Book First Lesson for the Ninth Sunday 
after Trinity, anything else than abominable. On 
the other hand, take two instances of what I mean. 
How marvelously is the fact of the presence of God 
everywhere brought out in the one hundred and 
thirty-ninth Psalm: 


“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? 
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? 
If I ascend up to Heaven, thou art there: 
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold thou art there. 
If I take the wings of the morning, 
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 
Even there shall thy hand lead me, 
And thy right hand shall hold me. 
If I say, Surely the darkness shall overwhelm me, 
And the light about me shall be night; 
Even the darkness hideth not from thee, 
But the night shineth as the day: 
The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.” 
{ ; | 
That is magnificent! We rightly say it is inspired. 
It is poetry and religion at their highest and best. 
It would not detract from this but rather 
heighten our appreciation if at some time in our 
worship place were found for this expression of 


ON THE CHURCH 47 


the same thought from the Memorabilia of Socra- 
tes: ‘Socrates thought that Gods care for men 
not after the fashion that the many think; for 
they think that the Gods know some things and 
others they do not know; but Socrates thought that 
the Gods know all things, the things that are said, 
and the things that are done, and the things that 
are thought over in silence; and that they are pres- 
ent everywhere; and that they give revelations to 
men about all human affairs. (Memorabilia, L-I. 
C.1.19.) 

The other instance is the story of the call of 
Abraham. We are familiar with it as given in 
Genesis. It is told with even more force and 
beauty in the Koran: ‘“ Thus did we show unto 
Abraham the kingdom of heaven and earth that he 
might become one of those who firmly believe. 
And when the night overshadowed him he saw a 
star, and he said, This is my Lord; but when it set 
he said, I like not Gods which set: and when he 
saw the moon rising, he said, This is my Lord; 
but when he saw it set he said, Verily if my Lord 
direct me not, I shall become one of the people 
who go astray. And when he saw the sun rising, 
he said, This is my Lord, this is the greatest; but 
when it set he said, O my people, verily I am clear 
of that which ye associate with God: I direct my 
face unto him who hath created the heavens and 
the earth.” (The Koran, Chap. VI.) 

It will help to deepen men’s faith in the spirit 


48 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


of God and the reverence for that spirit’s work if 
the Church will teach men to recognise the mani- 
festation of that spirit in all men, everywhere, and 
always. 

(3) The central truth of Christianity must in- 
spire the Church to give a larger and richer inter- 
pretation of the Gospel of Christ, an interpretation 
which shall have power to reach men under the 
changed circumstances and conditions of modern 
life, and above all an interpretation which shall 
proceed from the assumption not that we are born 
in sin and the children of wrath, but that we are 
the children of God. 

Two words of Jesus give us the key to what I 
mean. Both of these are sayings in which Christ 
tells us of the purpose of His coming into the world. 
The first is taken from the Sermon on the Mount: 
“IT am not come to destroy but to fulfil”; the 
other from the Parable of the Good Shepherd: “I 
am come that they might have life and have it 
more abundantly.” 

The purpose of Christ’s coming to our human 
nature is not to destroy it, but to fulfil it, to sound 
the depths of its possibilities and realise them; to 
interpret to man what he essentially is and help 
men to be just that; to show men what the joy, the 
splendour, the beauty, the dignity of human life 
may be, and to raise man’s power of living to the 
highest degree,—that is the purpose of Christ’s 
coming to the human race and to every man. 


ON THE CHURCH 49 


All of this proceeds on the assumption that 
human nature is not essentially bad, but good; 
that the deepest instincts implanted in man are not 
implanted to be destroyed, but to be fulfilled; that 
life is not given us as a curse, but a blessing. 

The interpretation of the Gospel in the past has 
often proceeded on a radically different assump- 
tion. It said human nature is bad, bad, bad. 
Some said “ It is totally depraved.” Others, ‘‘ No, 
no, not quite so bad as that. Not totally bad; but 
very far gone from original righteousness.” At 
all events, men said it was so bad that it deserved 
eternal punishment in the fires of hell. The Gos- 
pel which it preached in its crudest form was that 
God has provided a way of salvation by which 
man may escape the fires of hell. Then came a 
less crude form and men were taught the much 
more wholesome lesson that the real evil is sin 
itself, and the Gospel became the message of how 
to escape sin. And that is as far as the Church 
generally has gone; and so in some pulpits the talk 
is always of sin, till one’s heart is hardened to the 
word, as one remembers that the sin of all sins is 
not the wrongdoing one may be guilty of, but the 
failure to be what God intended us to be. The 
larger interpretation of the Gospel puts not less 
emphasis upon man’s sins of commission but vastly 
more upon his sins of omission. It does not keep 
telling men how bad they are, but how they may 
become better than they are. It does not keep 


50 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


telling men how they may flee from the wrath to 
come, but tries to inspire them to press on to the 
‘““mark of the prize of the high calling of God in 
Christ Jesus.” 

It tells men not that the world is a vale of mis- 
ery, but that it is one of the mansions of the 
Heavenly Father’s House in which man is to live 
till he is called to move on to another. It bids men 
make much of themselves and their fellows, think 
high thoughts of themselves and their fellows, press 
home great demands for themselves and their fel- 
lows. They are God’s children in God’s world. 
Therefore nothing is too good or great for them. 
It bids men live, not a starveling, but a full, rich 
life. Christ comes to us that we may have life 
and have it more abundantly. Strengthen, en- 
large, expand, enrich, purify every part of human 
nature, for the Son of God has come not to destroy 
but to fulfil. 

If, now, we carefully consider the changed cir- 
cumstances and conditions of our modern life it is 
plain that this larger interpretation of the Gospel 
becomes imperative. The conditions to which I 
refer prevail more or less all over the world, but 
specially in Christian lands. They are indeed dis- 
tinctive of Christian lands. What gives them, too, 
need of special consideration is that these condi- 
tions are plainly likely to be permanent, and to 
become more and more general and more marked 
in time to come. 


ON THE CHURCH 51 


Consider, first, the vast increase of wealth in 
Christian lands. Real wealth, I mean, of course, 
resulting from the wonderful inventions and dis- 
coveries men have made in the last century, so that 
the necessaries, comforts, and conveniences of life 
are now placed within the reach of a constantly 
increasing proportion of the population to a degree 
never before dreamed of. And this is only a be- 
ginning. The best authorities tell us that the time 
is not far distant when we shall be able to produce 
more than we now produce, with a working day of 
four hours. 

Consider next the increase and diffusion of 
human knowledge. Every day sees the domain of 
darkness diminished, and the kingdom of light 
enlarged. Every year sees a larger proportion of 
the population receiving larger and more accurate 
knowledge. Not only our elementary schools, but 
our high schools and colleges are crowded to their 
utmost capacity. And everywhere are to be found 
the devotees of truth with indefatigable pains seek- 
ing to answer the world’s hungry cry, ‘“‘ Give us 
light.” 

Consider, too, how the area of man’s freedom 
is being every day enlarged; freedom not simply 
from the tyranny of master or state, but freedom 
from the tyranny of fear; the tyranny of circum- 
stances; the tyranny of prejudices and conven- 
tions; the tyranny of the dead hand of the past. 

And once more consider how from all these there 


52 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


has come to this age a great hope, a hope that will 
not die in spite of the great war and all the disap- 
pointment it has brought with it, the hope of a 
better and happier world, the hope of real progress 
for humanity, the hope of the realisation of what 
prophets have dreamed of and martyrs given their 
lives for, the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven 
on earth. 

That these are characteristics of our modern life 
no one will deny. That every one of these carries 
dangers with it, subtle, pervasive, powerful, is 
equally plain. But unless the Church expects 
humanity to become a race of cowards, running 
away from the path of life because of the dangers 
along the way, making the great refusal and saying 
“Nay ” to God-given instincts, it must give men 
a Gospel which shall include these dominant facts. 
The passionate desire to subdue the earth and 
make things minister to life which is at the heart 
of the craving for wealth; the passion for light in- 
stead of darkness which makes men give labour- 
ious days and sleepless nights for knowledge; the 
will to give life itself for liberty; the never-dying 
hope that makes men face the perils of transition 
looking always for a better resting place, are in- 
stincts that God has planted deep in the heart of 
humanity. They demand fulfilment. They have 
a right to demand fulfilment. Humanity will turn 
its back upon its manifest destiny unless they gain 
fulfilment. The Gospel which does not include 


ON THE CHURCH 53 


these will cease to be a Gospel and become a 
counsel of despair. 

There is no room for such gloomy forebodings 
to the man who holds fast the everlasting Gospel 
of Jesus Christ that man is the child of God. In 
this faith he will face fearlessly all that seems dark 
and threatening in the present. He will “ greet the 
unseen with a cheer.” 

(4) And lastly. The consciousness of her sub- 
lime message must inspire the Church to a deeper 
realisation of the work she is specifically commis- 
sioned to do, namely, to bring in the Kingdom 
of God. 

As these lectures are an attempt to show some- 
thing of what that means in the larger interests 
of man’s life, I shall confine myself here to a single 
illustration: 

When the Great War broke out, and men in 
lands calling themselves Christian were faced with 
the horrors it involved, everywhere they looked to 
the Christian Church to do something to avert it,— 
the Church whose message was “ Peace on earth, 
good will to men.” It is needless to say the Church 
did nothing. Rather the reverse. So far from 
speaking any strong words of protest, it became 
everywhere the justifier of the war; and Christian 
ministers in Germany vied with Christian ministers 
in England and France in urging their people to 
the contest. Perhaps this is what we might have 
expected when the war had begun. The thing that 


54 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


strikes us of the Church with shame is that before 
the flames broke out the Church did so little to 
prevent the accumulation of jealousy, ill-will, pre- 
judice and greed that were the fuel piled high to 
be fanned in an instant into a conflagration. 

We cannot help .contrasting the little that was 
done by the Church with what was done by the 
despised Socialists. For years before the war every 
Socialist Platform put out by their General Con- 
ventions contained warnings of war, injunctions 
against war, exposures of the iniquitous causes 
of wars. On the very eve of the declaration of war 
the passionate protests against it were not issued 
by great gatherings of representatives of the 
Church, but by gatherings of Socialists. 

The facts are humiliating but they should be 
much more generally known by us of the Church. 

On July 28th, 1914, less than three days, that is, 
before the breaking out of the war, the Interna- 
tional Socialist Bureau, representing the Socialist 
parties all over the world, was in session in Brus- 
sels and gave its attention wholly to the possibility 
of war. It issued a manifesto protesting against 
war, and calling on Socialists all over the world to 
renew their efforts against it and in behalf of peace. 
This was followed the next day by a monster 
demonstration against the war, where on the same 
platform, Haase speaking for Germany, and Jaurés 
(on the very eve of his assassination as a martyr 
in the cause of peace) speaking for France, united 


ON THE CHURCH 55 


in denouncing “ the criminal madness which would 
cover all Europe with blood ”! What is even more 
remarkable; in Berlin itself, that same second day 
before the declaration of war, twenty-eight Social 
Democrat mass meetings were held, at one of which 
seventy thousand people were present, the text for 
all the meetings being “‘ War against War,” and 
the resolutions passed ending with these words, 
‘“‘ Down with the cry for war. Long live the inter- 
national brotherhood of man.” 

We, of the Church, may well ponder these facts. 
Christ one day said this to His disciples: ‘‘ What 
think ye? A man had two sons; and he came to 
the first and said, Son, go work today in the vine- 
yard. And he answered and said, I will not: but 
afterward he repented himself and went. And he 
came to the second and said likewise. And he 
answered and said, I go, sir: and went not.” 
(Matt. xxi: 28-31.) 

There lie before the Christian Church today such 
opportunities of advancing the Kingdom of God as 
the world has never before seen. If the Church is 
true to her mission she will not rest content with 
praying ‘“ Thy kingdom come,” but will be jealous 
with a burning jealousy lest any other agency do 
more than she to establish that Kingdom among 
men. 






ai Me AY 
A teas 
I aN he \ 


FEF Wott 






























#110 Li ; 
, hae 


t 
: VM 
Nes La 
| re ht 
ks ast 


4%, 
as 








Gyayti.' fy, ee 
Oe MAE MS, 3; 
LN es t. 


I] 


THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 
ON THE FAMILY 


lah 
* 


i ' 
Lay 
ina ft 4 





I] 
THE FAMILY 


SRE are to study in this lecture the in- 
¥/@ fluence of Christianity on the family; 
i Vi y and of all human institutions this is the 
) s7 most Important. 

Whether, as many sociologists aver, the family 
is to be regarded as the unit of society, or whether 
the social unit is the individual, the vital impor- 
tance of the family is equally apparent; for the 
family in a large degree makes the individual. The 
family determines the race to which the individual 
belongs, his colour, his nationality, his native char- 
acteristics, his early environment, his education, in 
a large degree his health and happiness, his habits 
and character. About the family life are centered 
the memories and associations of childhood and 
youth which become part and parcel of the man. 
Because born through and into a family, no one 
can escape its influence. Two of the four evangel- 
ists considered the family of the Son of Man of 
such importance that they gave His genealogy. 

Through a human mother the human Jesus en- 
tered in a human way into the life of humanity; 
and when He was born His mother wrapped Him 


59 





60 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


in swathing bands, and wanting a cradle, laid Him 
in a manger. But the dependence of the Saviour 
of mankind upon the family from which He came 
did not end there. Take care, Mary! Do not 
make a misstep on the rough floor of the stable, 
lest that precious life be lost! Do not forget to 
nurse the helpless babe, lest He die of hunger. 
Do not neglect Him, lest ox or ass by foot or tooth 
injure Him, and He be sent halt or maimed into 
life. The beautiful words of family life get their 
deepest meaning formed about them from the asso- 
ciations of childhood. It is not going far afield to 
be sure that the word which was so constantly 
upon the lips of Jesus to express to the uttermost 
the love and care, the tenderness and compassion 
of God, the word ‘ Father,” received something 
of its marvellous richness in the mind of Jesus from 
the love and care of His father Joseph in the life 
of the family at Nazareth. 

The family in its present form, where, that is, 
there is one husband, and one wife, with the defi- 
nite relation of marriage between them, which rela- 
tion 1s for life, and where both parents share the 
responsibilities of bringing up their children, is 
now so generally established among all civilized 
nations that we are apt to assume that form as 
normal, and that it has prevailed from the begin- 
ning. But the fact is that this form of family has 
come very slowly, and that it never has been, and is 
not today, universal. Indeed, it has been well said 


ON THE FAMILY 61 


that the establishment of the monogamous family 
is the greatest achievement of humanity. 

These facts are of such importance that they 
are worthy of careful consideration. As the devel- 
opment of the marriage relation is bound up with 
the establishment of the family we shall consider 
them together. 

The successive stages by which marriage in our 
sense of the term has been attained and the family 
become an institution, would seem to be something 
like these. It is interesting to note as corrobora- 
tive of this that every one of these stages is to be 
found at the present time among peoples in differ- 
ent stages of development. 

First, there is promiscuity where the male human 
takes the female as he can get her. This promis- 
cuity without rule or restraint is found to be very 
rare even in inferior humanity. Perhaps next to 
this comes the collective marriage of clan to clan, 
where all the male members of one clan are the 
husbands of all the female members of the other 
clan. Out of this comes polygamy in its two forms, 
polyandry where one woman has many husbands, 
and polygyny where one man has many wives; but 
the latter everywhere tends to prevail over the 
former, so that we commonly use the word polyg- 
amy to cover it. Then there comes at last the 
form of marriage where the union is between one 
man and one woman, as long as they both shall 
live. Beside these every sort of marriage has pre- 


62 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


vailed at different times and places down to mar- 
riages which are entered into experimentally, or 
for a definite time, or for certain days in the week. 

With this development of marriage there has 
come the development of the family. There would 
seem to be more of family life among many kinds 
of birds and quadrupeds than exists at first among 
human beings. The male bird almost always feels 
some sort of responsibility for his offspring; for 
them he builds the nest, and while the eggs are 
being hatched and while the brood are helpless, he 
brings food. But in a clan or horde where no 
father knows who are his children there is nothing 
of family life. The providing for all the women 
and children rests with all the males, and the 
immediate care of the young rests with all the 
females. But there emerges a sense of property, 
and with it the desire to hand down that property 
to those who are nearest of kin. Now though in 
such a state of society it is not possible to identify 
the father, it is possible to identify the mother; 
and thus arises the matriarchate, where descent is 
reckoned from the mother, and property is handed 
down through the mother,—a state of society 
which may at all times advantageously be studied. 

But the human male is stronger than the female. 
His passions are more aggressive. He comes to 
care for his own children and to desire to know 
who his own children are. Thus where the matri- 
archate exists it soon gives way to the patriarchate, 


ON THE FAMILY 63 


where the father is the head of the family and 
rules with strong hand. This type of family we 
find described in the early books of the Bible; 
and the stories there given of the family life of 
men with as many wives as they chose to take, 
furnish the most overwhelming condemnation of 
polygamy that could be written. It is the story of 
men learning in the bitter school of experience. It 
has been, indeed, out of that experience that men 
have come to learn the wisdom of a family life 
where there is but one husband and one wife, a 
father and a mother, both responsible for bringing 
up the children that they have both brought into 
the world. 

To see the influence of Christianity on the family 
we must note a principle which underlies its devel- 
opment and for a long time practically determines 
it, the principle that might makes right. The 
human male is stronger than the female. When it 
comes to a clash between them the man can have 
his way. He can knock the woman down, beat her 
with his fist or with a club, trample on her, drag 
her about by her hair, inflict pain and injury upon 
her in manifold fashion, till she submits. In this 
way the will of the stronger male determines the 
conduct of the members of the family; and conduct 
determines customs, and customs harden into laws. 
Might makes right. 

This runs everywhere through the developing 
life of humanity. The early books of the Bible 


64 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


show us how it prevailed among the Jews. Take 
the story of Judah and his daughter-in-law Tamar. 
It is reported to Judah that Tamar has played the 
harlot and is with child. Without a moment’s 
hesitation Judah cries, “ Bring her forth and let 
her be burned.” And it is from no fear of conse- 
quences, or any thought of an authority above him 
which may question his conduct, that the sentence 
is not executed, but because he finds out that he, 
himself, is the father of Tamar’s unborn child. 
(Genesis Xxxvili. ) 

The Book of Deuteronomy, representing a later 
stage of development, shows this absolute power 
of the father over his child coming into question. 
‘“‘ Tf a man have a stubborn and rebellious son that 
will not obey the voice of his father or the voice 
of his mother, and, though they chasten him, will 
not hearken unto them; then shall his father and 
his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out 
unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of 
his place; and they shall say unto the elders of 
his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, 
he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a 
drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone 
him to death with stones.” (Chap. xxi: 18-21.) 

The reader of The Odyssey sees how might made 
right in ancient Greece as he reads the gruesome 
story of how Ulysses on his return home treated 
his maid-servants. These maid-servants, in the 
absence of Ulysses, had indulged themselves in 


ON THE FAMILY | 7 65 


wantonness and unseemly conduct with Penelope’s 
suitors. When Ulysses has manifested himself as 
the master of the house by slaying the suitors and 
entering into possession of the palace, without a 
moment’s thought that there may be any authority 
in the land which will call his conduct into ques- 
tion he orders the maid-servants to be put to death, 
and the sentence is barbarously carried out by his 
son Telemachus, a model of all the virtues. 

At Rome we find perhaps the most signal illus- 
tration of this principle. Whatever were the steps 
by which the Patria Potestas gained its recognised 
place in Roman law, the basis of it lay in nothing 
else but the fact that might made right. To the 
father as head of the family the Roman law gave 
practically unlimited power over the other mem- 
bers of the family. The method by which a wife 
was originally obtained at Rome would seem to 
have been very generally by purchase. A man 
bought his wife, and she became his property. As 
such, he might sell her, give her away, lend her to 
another man, or rid himself of her. He might 
accept the children she bore him, or condemn them 
to be exposed, or sell them; under certain circum- 
stances he might kill them. Wife and children 
were his chattels; not quite on the same level with 
slaves and cattle, but almost as absolutely in his 
power. The developing sense of equity modified 
many of these provisions. Public opinion tem- 
pered many of their abuses. But the Patria Po- 


66 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


testas remained, and the basis of it and the per- 
petuation of it lay in just this fact, ““‘ Might makes 
right.” 

Against this principle Christianity is diametri- 
cally and eternally opposed. From the first it set 
its face against it, recognising it as a deadly foe, 
which it must destroy or by which it would be 
destroyed. Christianity has not as yet by any 
means destroyed this pernicious principle. It still 
remains, to thwart the efforts of man to be his true 
self and vindicate his divine origin. But the an- 
tagonism is there and will remain to the end of 
time. If man is the child of God the mere question 
of might has no place for consideration in the law 
of his life. Every human being by his birthright 
is worthy of consideration, the lowest as the high- 
est, the poorest as the richest, the child as the 
adult, the woman as the man, the servant as the 
master. 

Since the advent of the Son of Man the con- 
sciousness of this has been slowly but steadily and 
irresistibly working in the thoughts and feelings 
of men, lifting the conception of the family to a 
higher plane. 

We see this, for example, in the earliest docu- 
ments of Christianity, the letters of St. Paul. 

Now we must distinguish between Paul at his 
best and Paul when he is not at his best. Paul at 
his best speaks the truth as God has given him to 
see it. Paul not at his best pays consideration to 


ON THE FAMILY 67 


the weakness of the brethren and the strength of 
their inherited prejudices. Paul at his best says 
‘In Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female.” 
But Paul speaking, let us say, tactfully, says, 
‘“‘ Wives, be in subjection unto your own husbands 
as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of 
the wife as Christ also is the head of the Church, 
being himself the saviour of the body. But as the 
church is subject to Christ so let the wives also be 
to their husbands in everything.”’ 

Yet even so he strikes a new note, the note of 
reciprocal duties as from person to person, for he 
adds at once, ‘‘ Husbands, love your wives even as 
Christ also loved the church and gave himself up 
for it.” So also when he says, “‘ Children, obey 
your parents in the Lord,’ he immediately adds, 
‘““And ye fathers, provoke not your children to 
wrath but nurture them in the chastening and ad- 
monition of the Lord.” And when he says, 
“Servants, be obedient unto them that according 
to the flesh are your masters, with fear and trem- 
bling, in singleness of heart as unto Christ,” he says 
at the same time, ‘‘ And ye masters, do the same 
things unto them, and forbear threatening, know- 
ing that he who is both their master and yours is 
in heaven, and there is no respect of persons with 
him.” (Eph. v.) 

This emphatic enjoining of reciprocal duties is 
a very significant fact, almost revolutionary in the 
world of morals. If we take the Old Testament 


68 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


for example, where, if anywhere, we expect to find 
the highest principles of conduct inculcated, we 
look almost in vain for the injunction of duties of 
parents to their children; the speech is always of 
the duties of children to their parents. ‘‘ Honour 
thy father and thy mother” is one of the Ten 
Commandments; but there is not so much as a 
hint in them of the duty of father and mother to 
reverence their children, to respect their rights, to 
regard them always not as things but as persons, 
whose personality and individuality it was the duty 
of parents to develop. 

Perhaps it was too early in the history of the 
race to expect to find these. What was demanded 
of the Jewish father was that he should bring up 
his family to regard the best traditions of his 
people and make them Hebrews of the Hebrews, 
and we find occasional injunctions to parents to 
do this. But the emphasis is everywhere laid upon 
the duties of children to their parents and only 
occasionally on the duties of parents to their chil- 
dren. Indeed almost the only duty categorically 
laid upon parents even in that wonderful handbook 
of wisdom out of which so many splendid lessons 
of life may be learned, The Book of Proverbs, is 
the duty of chastising them betimes. Of injunc- 
tions to this it is full to repletion. (The worship 
of ancestors which still prevails over such a large 
part of the world is another example.) 

But the immediate effect of the Gospel of Christ 


ON THE FAMILY 69 


was not only to establish the personality of every 
member of the family but to give an immensely 
heightened sense of the sacredness of family rela- 
tions. The sense of this sacredness was a very real 
thing in the life of the ancient world even before 
the coming of Christ. The literature of Greece is 
full of it from The Iliad that tells the woes that 
came from a violated marriage bond, to the trage- 
dies of Sophocles that tell the nemesis of the viola- 
tion of the sacred bond between parent and child, 
brother and sister, husband and wife. The lessons 
which their glowing pages have for more than two 
thousand years been teaching are that family bonds 
are sacred things which can never be violated with 
impunity. 

But with the advent of Christianity this sacred- 
ness is heightened as the individuals between whom 
these relations exist are lifted up in worth and dig- 
nity. Paul speaks of the marriage relation, and 
now it is typical to him of the relation of Christ 
and the Church. There could be nothing higher 
and holier to the Christian than that, signifying to 
him the most sacred experience of life, ‘‘ Christ in 
him the hope of glory.” A new meaning came to 
the relation of father and child when men realised 
that the relation between them had its perfect 
exemplification in the relation of God and man. 
Even the slave could become a “ brother beloved ”’ 
when it was felt that he was a “ brother in Christ.” 
Till the advent of Christ personal purity was a 


70 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


thing almost unknown among men. For manifold 
reasons it was demanded among women, but sexual 
indulgence was regarded as so natural among men 
that it was taken for granted. But when Chris- 
tianity said, ““‘ Know ye not that your bodies are 
temples of the Holy Ghost,” it gave a reason for 
personal purity that was as applicable to the hus- 
band as to the wife, and when it whispered to 
father and mother that their child was a child of 
God it became sacrilege to expose that child, to 
die or to be taken for a slave or a prostitute or a 
gladiator. 

It is impossible for us here to show all that 
Christianity has actually accomplished in these 
directions. The results may be learned in the his- 
tory of morals, or they may be seen in what is 
being actually accomplished by Christian missions 
all over the world at the present time. The most 
convincing proof that Christianity has a Gospel 
of salvation for the world is to be found in the 
social results of Christian missions; and in no 
respect is it working greater wonders than in its 
transformation of family life. 

We pass to what is of very much greater impor- 
tance, the present and future influence of Chris- 
tianity on the institution of the family, particu- 
larly in Christian lands; for it is precisely here 
that in its present form it is being questioned. 

I do not mean simply by Utopians. Ever since 
the time of Plato there have been dreamers who 


ON THE FAMILY 71 


in constructing ideal commonwealths have held 
that the family is a stumbling block, and have ad- 
vocated, sometimes a community of wives, very 
generally a community of children. But the ques- 
tion of the family is approached now from a differ- 
ent angle, the angle of the individual rather than 
that of the state. This questioning takes many 
different forms, but they center largely upon the 
status of the unmarried mother, and the question 
of divorce. “Is there to be recognised legitimate 
standing in the community for motherhood, where 
there is no recognised fatherhood? And in par- 
ticular, where a woman becomes a mother not out 
of wantonness, but out of deliberate desire of 
motherhood, may she bring up her child, giving it 
her name and supporting it, and not only retain her 
own self respect, but have no thought of any 
shadow of reproach from her neighbours?” This 
question would most certainly have been brought 
very forcibly to the front if the late war had con- 
tinued till the number of women fit and desirous 
to become mothers was several times in excess of 
the number of men fit and willing to become hus- 
bands. As it was, the matter was very much more 
agitated in England, where the excess of such 
women was more than two million, than in America 
where the loss of men was much less. 

It is evident that neither this question (upon 
which I shall not enter) nor the question of divorce 
can be settled by saying that the present form of 


72 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


the family is of divine institution, because normal 
and existing from the beginning. “ As it was in 
the beginning, is now, and ever shall be” has no 
relevancy to that which has a history and a recog- 
nised evolution. This one must frankly admit. 
On the other hand, it is equally true that it is a 
stage of development which is recognised almost 
universally as the best yet reached, and as such 
adopted over almost the whole of the world that 
has any claim to civilisation. This fact gives it a 
standing in the minds of thoughtful people which 
it will be very difficult to shake. 

Before taking up the question of divorce I want 
to say two things as emphatically as I can. 

Back of the question of marriage and divorce 
lies the question of sex and the instinct which leads 
to marriage. Some one has said there are only two 
subjects on which we are always looking for light, 
sex, and the future life. With reference to sex a 
certain reticence is always demanded, but there is 
no question on which it is more important that wise 
words should be spoken. 

The instinct which leads men and women to 
marriage, out of which comes the continuation of 
human life, is a holy thing; let us get that fixed in 
our minds once for all. It is a holy thing; yet out 
of it springs a large part of the tragedies of life. 
Of all the causes of evil this is the hardest to con- 
trol and turn its mighty forces into healthy and 
beneficent channels. Upon our wise dealings with 


ee 


-_ i ie 





ON THE FAMILY 73 


this instinct more than upon anything else the 
future of the race depends. 

Of many evils man is slowly gaining control. 
Less and less each year we fear disease and prema- 
ture death; we are gaining the control over them. 
Poverty as a social evil is being slowly, very, very 
slowly but surely done away with; and the time 
seems not far distant when the instinct which bids 
men “ Put but money in thy purse,” ‘‘ Money, 
more money, always more money,” will be under 
social control and made to minister to human ad- 
vantage. War is dying hard. The instincts of 
self-assertion, self-interest only, desire for domi- 
nance, determination that might shall make right 
which have kept wars alive, have played their part 
long enough, and men are feeling it is time they 
moved off the stage. 

But how is it to be in the future with the repro- 
ductive instinct? It is plain that it is never likely 
to be diminished, much less to die out among men. 
Who indeed that believes in healthy, vigourous, 
full-blooded, every-way-alive men and women 
would desire such a thing for an instant? But the 
danger lies in the opposite direction. The very 
advances in civilization we are making tend rather 
to stimulate it. The coming of the sexes together 
with greater freedom for work and play, the more 
vigourous bodies of both men and women, the more 
generous style of living generally prevalent, the 
larger leisure coming to more and more all the time, 


74 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


giving opportunity for thought and indulgence (for 
it is not the world’s workers but the men and 
women with little or nothing to do that are the 
dangerous classes here, for Satan finds some impure 
thoughts for idle heads to think )—all of these will 
certainly make the problem of personal purity and 
the proper relation of the sexes more and more 
difficult to solve. Yet unless it is solved, unless 
the individual learns to control this instinct, unless 
there is a right public opinion which shall make 
and enforce right laws as to these relations, how 
vain is the thought of anything like real progress 
for the race. We may multiply and diffuse the 
comforts and conveniences of life, we may annihi- 
late illiteracy and crass ignorance, we may reduce 
crimes of violence to an inconsiderable minimum, 
we may do away with wars and rumours of wars, 
we may lengthen out the span of man’s life in ap- 
parent health and outward happiness till the av- 
erage 1s a hundred years or more, yet all of this 
will be dearly bought if they bring with them the 
sexual immorality of Corinth, or Rome, or Anti- 
och; or worse still if, as some would have it, they 
sink us to the unspeakable degradation of Sodom 
and Gomorrah. 

My other contention is this: Most thoughtful 
men have come to see that the only adequate safe- 
guard of personal purity is in the Gospel of Christ. 
Men and women cannot be kept from sexual im- 
morality by law; there is always an opportunity of 


ON THE FAMILY 75 


evading it. Nor can they be deterred by telling 
them of the danger of insidious and loathsome dis- 
eases; they question the statements, think the peril 
can be avoided or averted, and are willing to take 
their chances. But let them once become pos- 
sessed by the thought that because we are God’s 
children our bodies as well as our souls are sacred, 
and the question for them is settled. There is no 
place for personal impurity for the man to whom 
his body really is the temple of the Holy Ghost; 
his body and equally the body of the woman he 
would have made the partner of his sin. 

In precisely the same way the difficult problems 
connected with the institution of the family can 
find their solution only in the Gospel of Christ. If 
Christ is the Saviour of the world He must have 
some message of salvation for the family; and by 
“salvation”? we mean not necessarily preserving 
it precisely in its present form, but preserving in 
it what is good; purging it of what is bad, and 
adding to it 1f necessary what may tend to make 
it what it may reasonably be hoped to be in this 
world of imperfect human beings. 

As, therefore, we believe there is no other 
Saviour but Jesus Christ we must look for the 
salvation of the family in the teachings of Jesus 
Christ. 

What is the teaching of Jesus as to divorce? 
Does it justify divorce under any circumstances 
whatever? Does it justify divorce for the adultery 


76 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


of husband or wife? Does it justify divorce for 
any cause except adultery? 

There are two occasions in the Gospels where 
Jesus is recorded as having spoken on the subject. 
The first is in these words in the Sermon on the 
Mount. “It was said also, whosoever shall put 
away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorce- 
ment; but I say unto you, that every one that put- 
teth away his wife, saving for the cause of fornica- 
tion, maketh her an adulteress: and whosoever 
shall marry her when she is put away, committeth 
adultery.” (Matt. v: 31, 32.) 

If these words are to be taken as Christ’s au- 
thoritative statement of what is to be for all time 
His law to His disciples it is evident that divorce 
is forbidden by Him in every case but adultery; 
but that it is permitted in the case of adultery. 
These words are not recorded by St. Mark, nor by 
St. Luke in his account of the Sermon on the 
Mount; but they are given by St. Luke later on 
without any connection to show when or why they 
were spoken; and in giving them he omits entirely 
the exceptional case of adultery. 

The second occasion is reported by both St. 
Matthew and St. Mark. We give the account of 
St. Mark as the simpler and probably the older: 


“And there came unto him Pharisees and asked 
him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? 
tempting him. And he answered and said unto them, 
What did Moses command you? And they said, 





ON THE FAMILY as 


Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to 
put her away. And Jesus answered and said unto 
them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you 
this precept. But from the beginning of the creation 
God made them male and female. For this cause 
shall a man leave his father and mother and shall 
cleave to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh. 
What therefore God hath joined together, let not man 
put asunder. And in the house his disciples asked 
him again of this matter and he saith unto them, 
Whosoever shall put away his wife and marry an- 
other committeth adultery against her: and if she her- 
self shall put away her husband and marry another, 
she committeth adultery.” (Mark x: 2-13.) 


Here we have the same command as that given 
in the Sermon on the Mount, and with the differ- 
ence that St. Mark omits entirely the exceptional 
case of adultery. In St. Matthew’s account, how- 
ever, of the same question and answer Christ is 
reported as making the same exception, “‘ Except 
for fornication.” 

If, therefore, the words of Jesus as reported by 
the evangelists on these two occasions are to be 
taken as by themselves furnishing the law of mar- 
riage for all time, we are plainly compelled either 
to say (as many do, following the accounts of 
Mark and Luke) that Christ forbade divorce under 
any circumstances; or, following the account of 
Matthew, to say that He forbade it under all cir- 
cumstances except in the case of adultery. 

But there are many others to whom this view 


78 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


of the matter is far from satisfactory, and for 
these reasons. 

In the first place we are not-—we never can be— 
sure exactly what Christ’s words on the subject 
are. St. Luke omits where St. Matthew inserts, 
and St. Matthew again inserts where St. Mark 
omits the exception, and St. Luke omits the inci- 
dent altogether. 

In the next place, supposing the words of Christ 
to have been exactly reported by either one of the 
evangelists, there is nothing in either case to indi- 
cate that Christ intended them to be a rule binding 
on His disciples in all time. 

In the Sermon on the Mount the words occur as 
one of a number of instances in which Christ tells 
His disciples how He has not come to destroy the 
law and the prophets but to fulfil them, that is to 
do them perfectly, in the spirit and not in the 
letter, so that the righteousness of His disciples 
must exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and 
Pharisees, scrupulous as that was. Now, in every 
one of these instances Christ’s words are found 
impracticable if interpreted in the letter, but full 
of life, inspiration, and lifting power if interpreted 
in the spirit. We do not, as we should if we fol- 
lowed the words of Christ literally, consider a man 
a murderer if he has been guilty of anger even if 
causeless, nor an adulterer for an impure look; nor 
do we hesitate to take an oath in court because 
Christ has said “ Swear not at all”; nor do we 


—— 


ON THE FAMILY 79 


cease trying to put down wrong because Christ 
said “ Resist not him that is evil’; nor do we lend 
to every importunate borrower, or give to every 
beggar because Christ said “‘ Give to him that ask- 
eth thee, and from him that would borrow of thee 
turn not thou away.” 

Yet it is just in the midst of these sayings, and 
precisely in the same way that Christ says the 
words about adultery. It would seem reason- 
able, therefore, to assume that the same method 
of spiritual interpretation which has made of 
these sayings of Jesus, admitted to be impracti- 
cable if taken literally, the life-giving forces of 
Christian conduct and character, should be ap- 
plied equally to Christ’s words with reference to 
divorce. 

A careful examination of the other reported 
words of Jesus on the subject seems to lead us even 
more forcibly to the same conclusion. 

In this case the Pharisees asked Christ the spe- 
cific question, ‘‘ Is it lawful for a man to put away 
his wife? ” and to these words St. Matthew tells 
us they added “ for any cause’; showing they be- 
longed to the school of Jewish teachers which held 
the lax view of marriage which permitted divorce 
practically at the will of the husband. Christ’s 
reply gives us the loftiest conception of marriage. 
He carries the institution back to the creation 
where God made male and female. He put into it 
the love of man for woman and woman for man 


80 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


which in every generation leads men to leave father 
and mother and cleave to wife. Where this fun- 
damental instinct draws them together, where the 
love is which rises above other loves, there is the 
union which of two makes one, there is true mar- 
riage, God has joined them together, man must 
not put them asunder. 

It was when His disciples asked Him as to this 
that Christ spoke the words we have quoted. Its 
application is plainly to those who are married in 
the true sense He had Himself described. It cer- 
tainly is stretching—nay, it is profaning—the 
words of Jesus to make the words “‘ what God hath 
joined together,’ cover the union of man and 
woman where the priest in the very moment when 
he is solemnising their marriage knows that not 
God but the devil has joined them together, the 
devil of lust, or the devil of greed, or the devil of 
social ambition, or the profane devil which makes 
a mockery of the deepest sanctities of life. 

To take these words of Jesus as establishing a 
fast and fixed rule for all time is to run counter 
to the whole method of Christ’s teaching. No- 
where is He a layer-down of rules, but everywhere 
He is a giver of principles and an inspirer of the 
highest. To attempt to follow His words in the 
letter as rules of conduct is often fatal to following 
them in the spirit. He Himself said, ‘‘ The words 
that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are 
life.” (John vi: 63.) Where would the Christian 


ee a ee eee 





ON THE FAMILY 81 


Church be today, for example, if the apostles had 
taken these words of Christ literally: ‘ The scribes 
and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; all things 
therefore whatsoever they bid you, these do and 
observe.” (Matt. xxiii: 2.) 

And, most of all, I cannot help thinking that 
taking these words of Jesus as giving an authori- 
tative rule for all time as to divorce is inconsistent 
with the fundamental teaching of Jesus. As He 
taught of the Sabbath, so of every institution; the 
institution is made for man and not man for the 
institution. “ By their fruits ye shall know them.” 
The real test of the present form of marriage is, 
how does it work? Granting that marriage for life 
is the ideal: it nowhere seems to have been the 
method of Christ to force the ideal upon men. He 
spoke as men were able to bear it. With Him it 
was “‘ first the blade, then the ear, then the full 
corn in the ear.” “ To as many as received Him 
to them gave He power to become sons of God.” 
They were already sons of God by birth, but He, 
the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and 
truth, came to awaken in men the passion to be 
like God because they were God’s children. Men, 
therefore, were to be led, little by little, to a real- 
isation of their high calling. As God’s children 
they were free agents, and might reject Him. He 
would not, could not force men to accept Him. 
There were times when the only way to help men 
was to turn away from them. “ Give not that 





82 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast your 
pearls before the swine.” 

So in His teaching about marriage and divorce. 
He held up the ideal; He would make no effort to 
force men to follow it. On the one hand He could 
say, ‘‘ Every one that looketh on a woman to lust 
after her hath committed adultery with her already 
in his heart ”’; but on the other hand He could say 
to the woman taken in the very act of adultery, 
‘“‘ Neither do I condemn thee, go and sin no more.” 
He thought always of the individual man or 
woman, rather than of the custom or class or insti- 
tution which claimed the right to determine con- 
duct. Such a teacher, however high his view of 
marriage, would be the last to think of trying to 
tie His followers to the letter of a law which in 
trying to guard an institution should work inex- 
pressible misery in countless individuals. 

For these reasons we must seek the influence of 
the teachings of Jesus on the institution of the 
family as threatened with disruption by the preva- 
lence of divorce, somewhere else than in His re- 
ported words on the question. 

First, let us look at some of the facts of the 
situation: 

It is very easy to get at the superficial facts. 
We all know that within the last forty years di- 
vorces have become more and more common all 
over Christendom. They are most common here 
in America, where there are over one hundred and 


ON THE FAMILY 83 


forty-eight thousand divorces granted each year, al- 
most one divorce to every seven marriages. We all 
know how the number of causes for which divorces 
may be legally granted have increased, till now it 
is practically possible for any husband and wife 
who have both become dissatisfied with the marital 
relation and desire to be separated, to secure a 
divorce. Worse still, we all know that there is no 
uniform law for marriage and divorce in the United 
States, so that under certain circumstances it is 
impossible for man or woman to know if they are 
legally married, or are bigamists, or are living in 
adultery. 

These are the superficial facts of the case; but 
when we remember the bright dreams of happiness 
brought to naught, the solemn vows broken, hearts 
filled with bitterness, families disrupted, children 
without real homes, ideals of the most sacred things 
in life lowered till marriage becomes a subject for 
jest, and the unsavoury reports of divorce proceed- 
ings are thrust by the newspapers before the eyes 
of every family in the land, one does not wonder 
that there are those who cry out that we are going 
to the dogs, and that Christian civilisation, if there 
ever was such a thing, is a thing of the past. 

But these are only the superficial facts of the 
case. They present some of the evils brought with 
the increase of divorce. They tell us nothing of 
the evils from which divorces save us. 

A single instance given by Maude Royden in an 


84 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


article on What is Marriage, in the Atlantic 
Monthly for September, 1923, will show what I 
mean. We must, in reading it, remember that in 
England divorce is not granted to a woman simply 
on the ground of adultery of the husband. There 
must be cruelty as well as adultery. Lord Buck- 
master’s words are quoted by Miss Royden: 


“I was, of course, faced by the question as to what 
is cruelty... . I made my own rules. If aman who 
was sober kicked his wife in the stomach when she 
was pregnant, that seemed to me enough; if she were 
not pregnant, and he was drunk, he might have to do 
it again, or else her complaint might be due to what 
the most persistent opponent of my bill called ‘ nerv- 
ous irritation.’ So, also, with kicking her downstairs, 
or making her sleep on the door-mat in winter, all of 
which cases I had to consider.” 


We shall not attempt to reproduce the pictures 
of misery, sometimes that of husbands, more fre- 
quently that of wives, which these words suggest; 
but they must be taken into account in making up 
the gains and losses which come from greater 
freedom of divorce. The following summary of 
the situation is made by Miss Spencer in her ad- 
mirable book on The Family and Its Members 
(Page 41). ‘‘ The tendency on the whole is toward 
a higher conception of what marriage should be 
and what it should do for both parties in the bond. 
The statistics of illegitimacy, of commercialised 
prostitution, of venereal disease, of infant mortal- 


ON THE FAMILY 85 


ity, of early death or lifelong invalidism of wives 
and mothers, of marital unhappiness and parental 
neglect which are found by honest investigation in 
states and nations in which no divorce is allowed 
do not lead to the belief that legal permanence of 
the marriage bond secures socially helpful family 
life. On the contrary, such facts already show 
that divorce in the civilisation we have inherited 
comes as a result of bad conditions which worked 
infinite harm before divorces could be obtained.” 

With these facts in mind it is evident that the 
influence of the teachings of Jesus must reach not 
simply to the question of the legitimacy of divorce, 
but to the still greater evils from which divorce is 
sometimes the sad but only escape. We find this 
in the central truth of Christ’s teaching, and we 
must look for its influence to come here, as it 
comes everywhere, through the individual into the 
institution. 

This will give us a higher sense of the sanctity 
of marriage than that ever taught by the state or 
by the Church. 

Until very recently the position of the married 
woman before the state was succinctly expressed 
by the word “ coverture.” The wife was a femme 
couvert, that is, a woman whose personality was 
covered up by, absorbed into, the personality of 
her husband. Though we have succeeded in es- 
caping from the absurdity of this doctrine we have 
not escaped the influence of its implications. 


86 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


Then has come the Church with its persistent 
teaching of the subordination of the woman to the 
man, the wife to the husband. St. Paul in his 
worst moments made it part of his teaching and 
the Church has echoed it and re-echoed it ever 
since. 

One may see this, for example, in the Marriage 
Service of the Episcopal Church. 

We may pass by the word ‘“ obey,” which the 
woman is required to promise as part of her mar- 
riage vow; pass by, too, the fact that after they 
have been married the minister does not say “I 
pronounce you husband and wife,” which is most 
certainly the language which the new relation they 
have entered into calls for, but ‘“‘man and wife,” 
as if the case were simply that of a man taking a 
wife and not equally that of a woman taking a hus- 
band. But listen to the language used before they 
make their marriage vows: “Then shall the min- - 
ister say ‘ Who giveth this woman to be married 
to this man? ’ and the minister receiving the woman 
at her father’s or friend’s hands shall cause the man 
with his right hand to take the woman by her right 
hand,” etc. And this part of the service is thus 
interpreted by Blunt in the Annotated Book of 
Common Prayer, (page 487): “ Thus she is given 
up from one state of dependence to another 
through the intermediate agency of the Church; 
‘The minister receiving the woman at her father’s 
or friend’s hands’ (to signify that her father’s 


ON THE FAMILY 87 


authority over her is returned into the hands of 
God, Who gave it) and delivering her into the 
hands of the man in token that he received her 
from God, Who alone can give a husband authority 
over his wife.” 

But the student of history sees here something 
more than this. He sees the persistent survival of 
the spirit and form of almost the oldest recognised 
marriage, the marriage by purchase. At a certain 
definite time the husband paid down to the father 
the money to purchase his wife, and the wife there- 
upon passed from the possession of the father to 
the possession of her husband. There is, indeed, 
no passing of money here. We have outgrown that. 
But there is the persistent thought that the woman 
in marriage passes from one state of dependence to 
another; a thought utterly inconsistent with the 
recognition of the full personality of the woman 
equally with that of the man. 

This is what the teaching of Christ gives us, and 
until the Church recognises the fact in her mar- 
riage service she must hold herself responsible in 
no small degree for the lack of the sense of sanc- 
tity in prevalent views of marriage. There is, in- 
deed, a certain sacredness in the relation of buyer 
and seller that still lingers about that service, there 
is, too, a certain sacredness about the relation of 
master and slave which was back of that. But the 
sacredness of the relation between man and woman 
who voluntarily, the man master of himself and the 


88 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


woman mistress of herself, because they love each 
other, take each other for better for worse, for 
richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, till 
death do them part, is infinitely higher than 
any sacredness which smells of commerce or the 
slave-market. 

The recognition of this is the main thing, but 
other things may help. A uniform divorce law so 
that men and women may know whether they are 
legally married or living in adultery will help. Sex 
education so that youth and maiden may not enter 
into marriage without knowing what marriage in- 
volves, will help. Better customs with reference to 
engagements will help. But the only thing which 
can really save the institution of marriage by 
making it the sacred thing Christ taught us it 
should be is the consciousness of both men and 
.women that each is a child of God with the sacred 
rights and sacred duties which belong to God’s 
children. 

This brings us to another branch of our subject, 
the influence of Christianity on the family as it 
concerns the child. This is of greater importance 
even than the question of divorce. A large part of 
the meaning of the family is found in the child. 
The worst feature of divorce is that in disrupting 
the family it is disastrous to the child. 

It will not be necessary to speak of the relation 
of the child to parent. That has always been suf- 
ficiently provided for by law, sacred and secular. 


ON THE FAMILY 89 


Moreover, the attitude of the child to the parent is 
in the hand of the parent, for in every family it 
will be what father and mother make it. But the 
relation of parents to children is a matter of tre- 
mendous and most vital importance. 

Of all religions Christianity looks most to the 
future. It concerns itself not so much with what 
has been, as with what is, and not so much with 
what is, at with what ought to be and what 
will be. 

More than this; it tells us that we are workers 
together with God. We are only beginning to see 
the sublime implication of this. Translated into 
the terms of modern thought it means that there 
comes a time in the evolutionary process (which 
is God’s method of working in nature, and history, 
and grace) when God puts His work into man’s 
hands and holds him responsible for it, as a father 
puts a piece of work into his son’s hands and holds 
him responsible for it. 

We have been made familiar with the thought of 
the long, long, long duration of life and of human 
life on the earth. We should also familiarise our- 
selves with the thought of the probable long, long, 
long continuance of life and of human life on the 
earth. In the long past the human race has 
reached a certain stage of development. The ques- 
tion for thoughtful men to consider is what shall 
the human race attain to in the long ages to come? 
We must face the fact that this will depend largely 


90 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


on the human race themselves. As God’s children 
the work is put by the Heavenly Father in their 
hands. Yet it is.a deplorable fact that up to the 
present time more attention has been given to 
developing grass, strawberries, potatoes, cabbages, 
pigs, sheep, cows and horses than to improving the 
breed of men. 

I am not going to attempt to treat of eugenics or 
birth-control or any other branch of science. But 
I want to say a word in behalf of the children yet 
unborn that are waiting, generation after genera- 
tion, to come up into the light of life, and fill the 
places on the earth that we now fill. They, too, are 
God’s children. They, too, have rights as such. 
We are responsible for seeing that those rights are 
regarded. ‘Their yet inaudible voices are lifted, 
their yet intangible hands are extended, pleading 
with us that those rights shall be regarded. 

What are these rights of the unborn that belong 
to them as God’s children? I want to speak, it 
must be very briefly, of three. 

(1) The right to be well-born, as they should 
be born who are God’s children. 

It has been said of many children that they 
have been damned into the world. They have 
been born of parents that should never have been 
allowed to mate; or, if mated, should never have 
been allowed to bring a child into the world. 
There are certain diseases that, if both father and 
mother have them, are practically certain to be 


ON THE FAMILY 91 


inherited by the children; others that may skip a 
generation and return to the children’s children; 
others that show themselves in different forms that 
are more terrible than the diseases themselves. It 
is almost as if the Hebrew legislator had the facts 
of heredity in mind when he said that the God of 
Israel was ‘“‘a jealous God, visiting the sins of the 
fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth 
generation.” 

Here there is call for wise legislation that shall 
begin by thoroughly studying the facts, and facing 
their meaning; and then, paying due regard to the 
liberty of the individual, put restraint on the in- 
discriminate spawning of children into the world 
who are practically sure to fill our insane asylums, 
or penitentiaries, or hospitals for incurables. The 
apparent hardship to a few individuals weighs very 
little against the cruelty to their offspring and the 
injury to society. 

But we need more than legislation in this matter. 
The conception of a child must come to be recog- 
nised as a holy act. Very few husbands and wives 
have come to realise this. The number of those 
who have realised it in the past is insignificant. 
If there has been any word which has been consid- 
ered to have authority here it has been the word 
which Jahveh is reported to have said to Noah and 
his family after the flood, which was reported to 
have reduced the population of the world to eight 
souls: ‘“ Be fruitful, and multiply and replenish 


| 


92 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


the earth.” This may have been a wise word to 
Noah under the then existing circumstances; but 
as often interpreted it has resulted in fat church- 
yards, and prematurely old and worn out wives 
and mothers. Marital rights are a very real thing 
in life and before the law. But as sometimes exer- 
cised they result in untold horrors. What sacred- 
ness is there in the conception of a child where one 
or both parents are at the moment in a state of 
beastly intoxication? Or when there has been 
force and violence on one side, or lust and seduc- 
tion on the other? The quality of children born 
is of vastly more consequence than the number. 
A thing so sacred as the conception of a child 
should be thought of, and planned for and prayed 
over by those who are to be father and mother as 
a great event in their lives. What can there be 
greater, since their child is a child of God? 

We are just beginning to realise the importance 
in the life of the child of the period of the mother’s 
gestation. The surroundings and experiences of 
the woman when she is to become a mother have a 
most vital influence in determining the health, 
vitality and character of the child. Take this sin- 
gle illustration: Mr. Sherwood Eddy tells us that 
the death-rate of infants under one year of age, in 
England, in 1921, was only eighty-three per thou- 
sand. But in the factory districts of Bombay the 
same year the death-rate of infants was, for fami- 
lies living in four-or-more-room tenements, one 


ON THE FAMILY 93 


hundred and thirty-three per thousand; for those 
living in three-room tenements, one hundred and 
ninety-one per thousand; for those living in two- 
room tenements, three hundred and twenty-one; 
and for those living in one-room tenements, eight 
hundred and twenty-eight. (New World of La- 
bour, p. 69.) Mr. Eddy adds that the average 
profits of the mills in Bombay the same year were 
one hundred and seventy per cent. 

Where poverty compels pregnant mothers to 
work in mills or factories till the very hour of their 
confinement, so that time and again children have 
been born in corners of mills, or cellars, or down 
in the mines (when women were allowed to work in 
the mines), it is impossible to expect such children 
to be born healthy and vigourous, with a fair 
chance of living good and useful lives. Something 
is being done to remedy this evil, but as yet but 
very little. 

It is encouraging that so much more is now 
being done for children at the time of birth and 
infancy. In many self-respecting communities 
trained maternity nurses are now provided to do 
all that they can by counsel and help to have 
children well-born, and when born, properly fed 
and cared for during infancy and early childhood. 
But this great work is only beginning. Realis- 
ing its importance we must be willing to spend 
much more than is now being spent to support 
and extend it. 


94 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


In all of this that I have so imperfectly outlined 
as to the life of the child one principle is to inspire 
and guide us, the basic Christian fact that every 
child born into God’s world is to be regarded as a 
child of God; that as such he has a right of the 
most sacred kind to be well-born; to have a father 
and mother that shall give him a sound mind in a 
sound body; that in his conception, in his pre-natal 
life, in his birth and infancy everything possible 
shall be done to secure him a fair opportunity 
of life; all this inspired and determined by the 
dignity and worth which belong to him as a child 
of God. 

(2) All this applies equally to the second right 
of the child, the right to be well brought up. 

Here, again, I shall not attempt to discuss all 
sorts of theories as to the purposes and methods 
of pedagogy and education in general. I want 
simply to emphasize the principle which must 
determine the purpose and method of all true 
education, what we start with taking the child 
to be. 

“Well brought up.” The phrase suggests to 
some the boy with good table manners, who knows 
how to bow and take off his hat, when to say “ Sir ” 
and ‘“ Madame” and “ Miss,” how to enter and 
leave a room, when he must stand and when he 
may sit. To others it means the boy who does 
his chores, can be relied on to run errands, is 
prompt at school and brings home good reports 


ON THE FAMILY 95 


from his teachers, will not lie, nor take the prop- 
erty of others. That is about all the phrase 
means sometimes; and you might attain very 
much the same results from a well brought up 
dog or monkey. 

“Train him up to be a bread-winner,”’ says one 
theory of education. ‘“ Man or woman must be 
that. A child must first of all be taught how to 
make a living and to pull his own weight and a 
little more in the boat. Therefore teach him, above 
all, what will enable him to do this, a trade or 
profession, something by which he can win his 
bread.” 

Does it never enter the mind of one advocating 
this as the supreme end in education, that it is 
written “ Man shall not live by bread alone ”’? 

Another says, “‘ That is not enough. Boys and 
girls are to be citizens. They must be bread- 
winners, but over and above that we want them to 
be good citizens. The individual is for the state, 
therefore the state must give with open hand to 
make the individual serviceable to the state. 
Nothing more can reasonably be expected of the 
state, but this it must do as involving the perma- 
nent well-being of the state.” 

In neither of these theories of education is the 
question considered of the nature of the child, and 
of the education which shall fulfil the child in ac- 
cordance with his nature. Yet unless this is under- 
stood from the beginning, and family, state, and 


96 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


Church conspire to work together toward this end, 
the child will be deprived of the best part of his 
birthright. 

I must not be tempted here, in speaking of the 
fulfilment of the child in accordance with his na- 
ture, to speak of the individuality of the child, that 
which makes him different from other children. 
Of course that must be considered in the education 
of each and every child. One of the greatest ad- 
vances we have made in our modern system of 
education is that in every way we are trying to 
take this into account and deal with each child as 
an individual. I must not speak of this. I want 
rather to emphasise that which belongs to every 
child, which is the vital thing to be considered in 
his education. 

If every child is a child of God, then every child 
is worthy of respect; and the first thing a. child 
should be taught from the attitude of others toward 
him is to respect himself. 

This respect must show itself as it has to do 
with the child’s judgments and opinions, and their 
.expression; and as it has to do with the child’s will. 

The common attitude as to the statement of 
their judgments and opinions by children is this: 
‘“‘ Children should be seen and not heard.” 

Contrast with this the words of Jesus: ‘‘ Out of 
the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast per- 
fected praise.” 

It is of vital importance in the education of 


ON THE FAMILY 97 


every child that he should be taught to form right 
judgments. To do this he must learn by experi- 
ence that his judgment counts, it is regarded by 
others. But if his judgment is to gain the respect 
of others it must be a right judgment. Others will 
not respect his judgment unless it is right. If his 
judgment is right therefore, and only if his judg- 
ment is right, may he respect himself. The begin- 
ning and end of the child’s self-respect lies in the 
respect toward him of others. 

So with the child’s will. The most contemptible 
creature among men is a man who has no will of his 
own. Yet the first effort of many parents in deal- 
ing with children is to break the will every time it 
tries to assert itself. 

With self-respect the education of every child 
should lead to self-fulfilment. The very word 
education shows us that is the central thought of 
the process. The great instincts of the child’s 
nature are toward what is good, not what is bad. 
He must come to realise this, and he can be 
brought to do so mainly by the attitude of others 
toward him. With his face toward life every child 
should be taught faith, not fear, hope, not hesi- 
tancy, great things, not little things, a feast pro- 
vided, not starvation, the world he is to live in a 
mansion of the Heavenly Father’s House, not a 
vale of misery; truth, beauty, righteousness and 
love his by inheritance, but an inheritance for 
which he must strive right manfully. 


98 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


Self-respect and self-fulfilment must be crowned 
with self-sacrifice. 

This is the note Christ struck: ‘“ He that findeth 
his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for 
the Son of Man’s sake shall find it.” 

From the first, the child must learn this. It is 
not necessary to use the word self-sacrifice. That 
may seem hard to the child. It will not at first 
appeal to him. But self-sacrifice translated into 
love and loyalty will come spontaneously. Love 
of home, of family, of friends, of country spring 
of seeds passed from generation to generation since 
the beginning of life. Love manifests itself in 
loyalty, and loyalty involves self-sacrifice; and he 
that is loyal to home, to friends, to country, to 
humanity will best find himself and fulfil himself 
in the self-sacrifice of love and loyalty. 

Nothing less than this is involved in the nature 
of the child, which nature must be recognised in 
his education. He is a child of God. 

The life of the Son of God on earth is to us the 
truest expression of the eternal life of God, in 
accordance with the divine nature. 

It tells us of the glory of God, the self-fulfilment 
of God, the self-sacrifice of God in His eternal 
ministration to all that He has made. 

The self-respect, the self-fulfilment, the self- 
sacrifice which we must have ever in mind in 
the education of the child are the self-respect, 
the self-fulfilment, the self-sacrifice which are in 


ON THE FAMILY ef 


accordance with the child’s nature, as a child 
of God. 

(3) And lastly. I believe we must emphasise 
more the right of every child to a happy childhood. 

No doubt to many in view of present conditions, 
it will seem unnecessary to speak of this. We 
may not go so-far as Thomas Carlyle and ask: 
“Happy? What right has any one to be happy? ” 
But there is a very general impression that things 
now-a-days are being made too easy for children, 
that they are allowed to have their own way much 
more than is good for them, that pleasure alone is 
made the aim and object of their existence, and 
that if we expect the stronger and more rugged 
qualities of character, the confessedly essential 
virtues to be developed in them, we must surround 
them more with an atmosphere of duty and let the 
question of happiness go. 

Every one, I think, who has been brought into 
intimate contact with standards and practises in 
our American homes will admit the force of this. 

Nevertheless, I am sure that the misunderstand- 
ing, the reaction. from which has brought about 
this deplorable condition, still runs very deep in 
the minds of many even of those who are seeking 
the wisest and best methods of education. 

That misunderstanding lies in thinking that the 
Cross is the end of life, instead of seeing that it is 
only the means of life. 

From the first preaching of Christianity, the 


100 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


Cross has been recognised as the distinctive em- 
blem of Christianity. 

And rightly. Because as no other religion or 
philosophy of life, Christianity has taught that for 
which the Cross stands, the patient endurance, the 
triumphing over and through sorrow, loss, suffer- 
ing, disappointment, defeat, agony, death. To the 
disciple who follows in the footsteps of the Master 
these may be made the ministers of life, bringing 
a strength and beauty of character which nothing 
else can bring. 

But bearing a cross is not the end Christ sets 
before men, but only the means to an end. The 
end is life. ‘‘ I am come that they might have life 
and have it more abundantly.” 

When nature would bring seed to perfection it 
does not plant it on stony ground, but in good soil. 
It does not send to it merely nipping frost, and 
blighting heat, and withering drought, and racking 
wind, but it sends refreshing dew, and life-giving 
rain, the shower and the sunshine. 

I wonder if even conscientious Christian parents 
always realise this? Does not the failure of many 
a home lie right here? 

Of course there is happiness and happiness. 
Of course, too, there are other things of higher 
value than mere happiness. But, after all, there 
are few experiences more likely to ensure noble 
manhood and womanhood than a happy childhood. 

Perhaps no two words have a more natural and 


ON THE FAMILY 101 


intimate association than home and _ happiness. 
We rightly seek to form that association in the 
minds of our children as it has to do with the life 
that awaits us after death, teaching them to sing 
“There is a happy land,” and ‘‘ Heaven is my 
home.” But if we fail to make that association as 
it has to do with life here, it will not be likely to 
be very vital as it has to do with the hereafter. In 
the Father’s house are many mansions. If, as we 
believe, happiness is to be the atmosphere of the 
mansion that awaits us, it is difficult to see why it 
should not also be the atmosphere of the mansion 
in which the Heavenly Father calls us to live now. 

We must leave the matter there. If the child 
of man is the child of God we need seek no 
further ground for claiming his right to a happy 
childhood. 





{iI 


THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 
ON THE STATE 


| 

WAY UD ay ota wy 

; i Oba aie) bh a 
aE py 

hah ead 


on Ry 
ey VALE 
1 VE aee vis £ y 

Moke bind 


ht ry ween 
Hib teal 


, ee a Mk 
het ie Ae bal 


i ! y ¢ 
| da at 





Il 
THE STATE 


(S)KE are to study, in this lecture, the in- 

#4 fluence of Christianity on the State. 
ANA y For this purpose I shall use the terms 

DVIG/EI state, nation and commonwealth as in- 
terchangeable, preferring the term state as carry- 
ing with it the thought of definite organisation. 
The state is the nation or commonwealth organ- 
ised after some definite fashion. 

To many there seems a difference in the origin 
of the state and the origin of the family and of 
the Church. We recognise no such difference. 
The Church and the family are divine institutions, 
and in the same sense the state is a divine institu- 
tion. ‘‘ There is no power but of God, the powers 
that be are ordained of God.” But the state is 
also a human institution, made of man and for 
man; and the Church and the family are human 
institutions in the same sense, made of man and 
for man. 

The rise of nations into conscious being is 
not always after the same fashion. The natural 
course would seem to be when the family expands 
till it becomes a clan or tribe, and this coalesces 


105 





106 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


with other closely related and contiguous tribes, 
and they become a nation. This is typically illus- 
trated in the history of the Jewish nation as we 
read it in the early books of the Old Testament. 
There is first Abraham, the father of the faithful. 
Though he had a large number of other wives than 
Sarah, and other children than Isaac, the family 
is kept together in Isaac. Isaac has two sons, 
Esau and Jacob; but Esau becomes the founder 
of a different family, and the family proper is car- 
ried on in Jacob. Jacob has twelve sons, each of 
whom becomes the head of a family; but the fam- 
ilies are kept together by their life together in 
Egypt. Each family expands into a tribe; and 
when they leave Egypt and settle in Palestine we 
have the twelve tribes, living side by side but with 
no unity of administration; and there results the 
chaotic condition of things so graphically described 
in The Book of Judges; “ In those days there was 
no king in Israel. Every man did that which was 
right in his own eyes.” Then came the unification 
of the tribes into a nation under Samuel and Saul, 
to attain the culmination of its power as a nation 
under David and Solomon. 

The circumstances under which the English 
nation came into conscious being were very differ- 
ent. Here, it is the story of conquest and amalga- 
mation. ‘There were the original inhabitants of 
the island, the Britons; the Romans invade and 
conquer the island, and leave their impress on 


ON THE STATE 107 


the face of the country, the language and laws 
of the inhabitants. Then come successively the 
Anglo-Saxons, the Danes and the Normans, 
each conquering in their turn, and each con- 
tributing to the character and constitution of the 
nation. 

Very different from either of these was the birth 
of America. Here the citizens of colonies from a 
distant continent one day declared their inde- 
pendence, and, when challenged to the gauge of 
battle, vindicated their claim. Then their repre- 
sentatives met in convention, and after months of 
stormy debate agreed on a constitution which was 
submitted to the people and after more months of 
still more stormy debate was finally adopted, and 
The United States of America was born. But 
what was it? Was it a nation? Or was it a con- 
federation? Was it a whole, more or less com- 
pact, made up of parts so loosely bound together 
that at any moment it might come to pieces? Or 
was it a nation one and indivisible? That ques- 
tion was not finally settled till eighty years later, 
when the Civil War once and for all established the 
position of the United States as a nation, one, solid, 
compact, indissoluble. 

Here are three different fashions in which three 
different nations have come into conscious being; 
yet, though they are different, no one would be 
tempted to think God’s hand is any more in the 
birth of one than of the others. In each we can 


Fn 
108 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


see the hand of man everywhere; but in each we 
can see also the hand of God. 

For the deep, divinely-planted instincts which 
lead men to come together into nations and to 
found states are everywhere the same. These are, 
very briefly, first the desire of defence against 
external enemies, and next the desire for mutual 
advantage and helpfulness. 

The first of these is common in various degrees 
to almost all living creatures. We see it, for ex- 
ample, in the marvellous organisation of bees and 
ants, or in the militant formations of wild horses 
on the plains. The second is found also in very 
many animals where their organisation reaches to 
very many purposes beside self-defence against 
external enemies, and where devotion to the 
commonwealth is so strong that without an in- 
stant’s hesitation they lay down their lives for its 
well-being. 

But in man this instinct comes to the front and 
asserts itself with tremendous power and _far- 
reaching results. ‘‘ The impulse to political asso- 
ciation,” says Aristotle (Politics, Book I, chapter 
2), “is innate in all men. Nevertheless, the author 
of the first combination, whoever he was, was a 
great benefactor of human kind. For man, as in 
his condition of complete development, 2. e., in the 
state, he is the noblest of all animals, so apart from 
law and justice he is the vilest of all. For injustice 
is always more formidable when it is armed; and 


ON THE STATE 109 


Nature has endowed man with arms which are in- 
tended to subserve the purposes of prudence and 
virtue but are capable of being wholly turned to 
contrary ends. Hence if man be devoid of virtue, 
no animal is so unscrupulous or savage, none so 
sensual, none so gluttonous. Just action on the 
other hand is bound up with the existence of a 
State; for the administration of justice is an ordi- 
nance of the political association and the adminis- 
tration of justice is nothing else than the decision 
of what is just.” 

It is through the development of this instinct in 
the common life that the will of God concerning 
man is conspicuously manifested. Men become 
conscious of this, and through this consciousness 
comes the feeling which characterises every great 
nation, that they are “ God’s peculiar people.” 
‘‘ In thee and in thy seed shall all the nations of the 
earth be blessed ” has its echo in every founder of 
a state worthy of the name. We are all familiar 
with this in the history of Israel, and the term 
“‘God’s peculiar people ” has been too often con- 
ceded to them as theirs by exclusive right. Yet 
that consciousness is surely with us as a nation; 
and there is no nobler expression of it than we find 
in Virgil’s lines on the divine call of Rome: 


“ Do thou, O Roman, mind with law to rule 
The peoples. These for thee shall be the arts, 
To spare the conquered and cast down the proud.” 
(4ineid vi: 851-3.) 


110 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


What, now, has been the influence of Christian- 
ity on the state? 

To answer this let us go back to that day in 
Athens when Plato tells us of the discourse of 
Socrates on the ideal state, which he has given to 
us in The Republic. He has come to that point 
where he feels that he must lay a strong foundation 
for the state, or the superstructure, however beau- 
tiful, will not stand, and he asks: “‘ How may we 
devise just one royal lie? . . . I will speak, al- 
though I really know not how to look you in the 
face or in what words to utter the audacious fiction 
which I propose to communicate gradually, first to 
the rulers, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the 
people. They are to be informed that their youth 
was a dream and the education and training which 
they received from us an appearance only; in 
reality during all that time they were in process of 
formation and nourishment in the womb of the 
earth where they themselves and their arms and 
appurtenances were manufactured and when they 
were completed the earth their mother sent them 
up; and their country being their mother and also 
their nurse they are therefore obliged to advise 
for her good, and to defend her against attacks, 
and the citizens they are to regard as children of 
the earth and therefore their brothers.” (Book 
III, 414, page 239, Vol. IT.) 

That is indeed a royal lie. Jesus Christ replaced 
it with a yet more royal truth when He said 


ON THE STATE 111 


“One is your Father, even God; and all ye are 
brethren.” 

This I take to be the unique contribution of 
Christianity to the state. This it gives the state 
as its enduring foundation. It tells us not only 
that the instincts which lead men to found the 
state are natural but that they come to us from 
God; they belong to us as God’s children. The 
ties that bind men together in the state are family 
ties, binding men to God the common father, and 
to each other as brethren. There can be no foun- 
dation more secure than this. There can be no 
other foundation so enduring as this. The rock of 
which the foundation is built is from the same 
quarry from which the stone for the superstructure 
is hewn; and the hewer of the rock, and the layer 
of the stone, and the architect who builds are all 
one. The state is from God, the men who found 
it are God’s children, the men who are built into 
it are God’s children. 

This is the fundamental assumption of Chris- 
tianity with reference to the state. Let us see what 
it carries with it. 

(1) It carries freedom. 

We have come to believe that men have an in- 
alienable right to liberty. On what ground does 
that right rest? To rest securely it must rest on 
something more than any human document by 
whomsoever signed. No Magna Charta or Bill of 
Rights, no Constitution or Declaration of Inde- 


1M I THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


pendence can give men a right to freedom, because 
it would imply that they had a right to give or 
withhold it; which is the very question at issue. 
The state itself cannot give the inalienable right 
to freedom. It is easy to say that rights are the 
creation of the state, that without the state there 
are no rights, that our very conception of rights 
comes to us through the state. There is, of course, 
a narrow sense in which this is true; and if we 
start with the assumption that that only is a human 
right which a man has acquired through the state 
into which he has been born, we need go no further. 
But the common sense of mankind repudiates any 
such narrow view of the term. A man’s rights 
reach to that which it is right that he should pos- 
sess. Even if the state refused the legal right of 
freedom men would still claim it as an inalienable 
right because they are sure the right to liberty 
rests on a higher grant than any state can make; — 
it rests on what men essentially are. 

There is something in man which eludes and 
transcends all our politics and statecraft. He 
knows that he is a free agent, with a will of his 
own. He knows, too, that his ultimate responsi- 
bility is to God. Men, indeed, hold him respon- 
sible to society for his actions, so far as society 
may be injured by them. He recognises that this 
is just. But beyond this is the larger question of 
his conduct and character, his thoughts, motives, 
purposes, the exercise of his will. Here, and in 


ON THE STATE 113 


every act of his life, his responsibility is to God. 
In the necessity of meeting that responsibility lies 
his claim to freedom. 

Perhaps the noblest plea ever made for man’s 
freedom is that made by St. Paul in his letter to 
the Galatians. He was pleading for religious 
freedom. Strange as it may seem that is the most 
difficult form of freedom for man to attain. Re- 
ligion is so fine and subtle a thing, so hard to grasp, 
so elusive and baffling, yet so mighty in its in- 
fluence, that men regard it as peculiarly sacred, a 
thing that must not be touched or meddled with, 
much less changed in any way; and thus they have 
come to consider things religious as peculiarly the 
realm of authority, where there is no room for 
freedom in thought or action. Paul was pleading 
for a liberty which was radical, that reached to 
practices in religion that had become sacred by 
centuries of usage and by claims universally recog- 
nised among his people as having the direct sanc- 
tion of God. On what ground could he dare to 
found his claim for freedom in such a case as this? 
Let Paul speak for himself: 


“ Ye are all sons of God through Christ Jesus. But 
I say that so long as the heir is a child he differeth 
nothing from a bondservant though he is lord of all; 
but is under guardians and stewards until the day 
appointed of the father... . But when the fulness 
of the time came God sent forth his Son, born of a 
woman, born under the law .. . that we might re- 


ee ee eee ———————EEE— 
114 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


ceive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, 
God sent forth the spirit of his Son into your hearts, 
.. . So that thou art no longer a bond-servant but a 
son... . Stand fast therefore in the liberty where- 
with Christ hath made us free.” (Gal. iii and iv.) 


Liberty which is founded on any less secure 
basis than this, man’s personality, the essential 
dignity of his nature as a child of God, is sure to 
degenerate either into selfish submission to the 
basest tyranny or into suicidal license. 

(2) It carries equality. 

Let St. Paul speak for us once more and in the 
same chapter of the same epistle: ‘‘ For ye are all 
the children of God through faith in Christ 
Jesus. . . . There is neither Jew nor Greek, there 
is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor 
female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 
ili; 26, 28.) 

When we speak of men being created equal we 
are apt to be met with the demand—“ Define what 
you mean by equality.” The satisfactory defini- 
tion may be found in these words of St. Paul. The 
equality which men demand is just that spoken of 
here, the equality of children in the same family. 
No one has any uncertainty as to what that means. 
He was born into a family. Perhaps it was a fam- 
ily of many children and each child in that family 
was different in almost every conceivable way from 
every other child, different in stature, in weight, in 
personal attractiveness, in physical strength, in in- 


ON THE STATE 115 


tellectual gifts, in tastes and temperament. But 
there was an equality among them about which 
there never was any doubt, the equality which be- 
longed to them as children of the same parents. 

There is where the men of a Christian state base 
their claim for equality in the state. 


*'For a’ that; and a’ that, 
A man’s a man for a’ that.” 


Every human being, by virtue of his humanity, has 
equal right with every other human being to be 
counted, equal right to be considered, equal right 
to form his opinion, to express it, and have that 
opinion pass for what it is worth, equal right to 
have his interest considered, equal right to stand 
erect as among his peers, not be forced to grovel 
before others arbitrarily classed as his superiors. 

This is almost distinctively a Christian thought 
as it shows itself in the life of the state. Greece 
knew it not. In the ideal community as described 
by Plato the greater part of the people were to 
have no voice whatever in the administration of 
the affairs of the state. Aristotle tells us that 
there are persons who “ are natural slaves, and for 
them as truly as for the body or for beasts a life 
of slavish subjection is advantageous.” (Politics, 
Book 1, Chap. VI, p. 12.) 

The practice of Greek democracies was abso- 
lutely at variance with it, as their base rested on 


116 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


slavery. Rome knew it not. The proud letters 
S. P. Q. R. class together Roman senate and 
Roman people, but the man of the senate stood on 
an entirely different plane from the man of the 
people. But the message of Christianity was revo- 
lutionary. It said: “God is no respecter of per- 
sons,’”’ and the age-long cleavage between Jew and 
Gentile was obliterated. It said: “‘ No longer a 
servant but a brother beloved,” and the doom of 
slavery was sealed. The task of abolishing arbi- 
trary distinctions and bringing men to the funda- 
mental ground of equality has been difficult: —how 
difficult, may be seen in the fact that it has taken 
more than eighteen hundred years of Christianity 
for society to recognise that woman equally with 
man is endowed with personality. 

(3) It carries with it duties as well as rights. 
The two must always go together. No man should 
speak of rights who will not acknowledge duties. 
The two rest on the same foundation and stand or 
fall together. So the determination of duties in 
the state comes from the same fact that determines 
rights. In the state men are brought into definite 
relations with each other, and their rights are de- 
termined by these relations. So also are their 
duties. At the basis of the state lies the fact that 
men are brothers. That relation determines their 
rights. It determines also their duties. In its 
very conception the state carries with it the right 
to make and enforce laws. To be lasting and ef- 


ON THE STATE 117 


fective they must be righteous laws. But laws can 
be righteous only as they are founded on right 
relations of men to the state and to each other. 
That right relation is the relation of brotherhood, 
and the only secure basis of human brotherhood is 
the divine fatherhood. Brotherhood that rests on 
anything else, on the colour of the skin, or identity 
of language, or contiguity in space, or similarity 
of customs, or mutuality of interests, will be found 
to rest on shifting sands. 

Liberty, equality, fraternity, in some degree at 
least realised in the state; this, I take it, is what 
Christianity has done in its influence on the state. 
It has carried these with it. It has furnished the 
enduring basis on which these rest. The state can 
never be considered Christian where these are not. 
Christianity has thus created the vision of true 
democracy, not simply government of the people, 
by the people, for the people, but in every depart- 
ment of life consideration of the people. It may 
not yet have made the world safe for democracy, 
or created a form of democracy which shall be safe 
for all people; but these are implicit. The man 
who grasps the central truth of the teachings of 
Jesus can never doubt that the kingdoms of the 
world shall become the kingdoms of God and of 
His Christ. 

With this in mind we pass from what has been 
the influence of Christianity on the state to what 
that influence must be in the present and the 


118 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


future. I want to speak of three ways in which 
it will show itself. 

(1) It will give us a new sense of the sacredness 
of the state. 

The very fact that in almost all so-called Chris- 
tian lands the democratic state is now established 
makes this more imperative, and at the same time 
more difficult to secure. At first men reverence 
most that which is far off, that with which they 
are not familiar, that about which the imagina- 
tion plays, wanting knowledge. The very word 
“sacred ” expresses this, meaning originally that 
which was set apart. As long as their rulers and 
law-makers were far off, hidden from contact and 
observation, men held them sacred. There was a 
divinity which hedged a king. The king could do 
no wrong. But when the average man finds him- 
self one of the governing class, with a voice in 
making and executing the laws, becoming familiar 
with the state, he is apt to lose something of his 
sense of the sacredness of the state. 

But Christianity brings us an ever-deepening 
sense of the sacredness of the state as having to 
do with the vital interests of the children of God. 
Man’s life and death, his being and well-being are 
the concern of the state. If there are any sacred 
offices they are these which the state exercises. 

Thus men still look to the state for protection 
from foreign enemies. Human nature is not as 
yet by any means so tamed that the peoples of 





ON THE STATE 119 


the earth may dwell in peace and security under 
their own vine and fig tree. Still there is that at 
the heart of men that makes them at times willing 
and ready to dispossess others of their vine and 
fig tree, and enter in and possess their land. They 
look to the state to protect them from such 
aggression. 

The state has the right and power to call out 
its citizens, and make them soldiers in its armies 
or sailors in its navies; to put arms in their hands 
and bid them fight; to tell them to forget the com- 
mandment ‘‘ Thou shalt not kill,” and go forth 
for the express purpose of killing; to destroy or 
confiscate the property of others; to engage in 
undertakings the inevitable result of which will 
be for the time being to change some of them into 
brutes, losing even the sense of decency, all pity 
and compassion, all sense of ordinary humanity. 
This is the undoubted right of the state. It may 
sometimes be its stern duty, and then its exercise 
may be a holy office. It may be exercised for 
selfish, ignoble ends, and then it is the work of the 
power of darkness. But the right of making peace 
or war rests (must it continue to rest?) with 
the state. 

To the state we look to preserve order at home, 
that men may live their lives and do their work 
without disturbance or molestation. 

To the state we give power to lay taxes and 
collect them, making the payment of them a mat- 


120 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


ter of strictest obligation. And when the state 
has gathered from all of us sums that mount up 
sometimes into the hundreds or thousands of mil- 
lions we give the state the right to spend these 
tremendous sums. They may be spent honestly or 
dishonestly, wisely or foolishly, but it is in the 
jurisdiction of the state to spend them. 

To the state we entrust the making of our laws. 
Public opinion is back of the making, and public 
opinion must be relied on to make sure that they 
will be enforced. But it is through the state 
that the laws are made which embody the sense 
of right the community has reached, laws which 
shall have a potent influence in determining the 
sense of right which shall pass to succeeding 
generations. 

And to the state we entrust the administration 
of justice, the dealing with questions of rights and 
of right in the concrete; the determination of what 
men must do in their dealings with each other, the 
determination of the penalties men must pay for 
the violation of laws. The state has the power of 
shutting men up in prisons for their natural lives, 
or of sentencing men to death. 

Perhaps no nobler plea for the sacredness of 
the state has ever been made than that made by 
Dante in his De Monarchia. Living at a time 
when the strife between church and state culmi- 
nated in the arrogant claims of Pope Boniface 
VIII., that power in secular as well as sacred things 


ON THE STATE 121 


was vested in the Pope as head of the Church, 
Dante stands forth the passionate champion of 
the divine right of the state. Looking out upon a 
world sore smitten with strife he saw that human 
life at its highest and best was impossible except 
in an atmosphere of peace. But peace to him 
seemed impossible save under the strong rule of 
an emperor possessed with as absolute power in 
temporal things as was the pope in spiritual 
things. The satisfaction of that need was in the 
purposes of God. Therefore the state was as 
sacred in its way as was the Church in its way, 
because equally with the Church it was established 
by God. 

But the sacredness of the democratic state rests 
not simply on the fact that the state is of divine 
establishment. Nor does it rest simply on the fact 
that the offices of the state are in themselves high 
and profoundly significant. It rests rather on the 
sacredness of those to whom the state ministers; 
as a necklace becomes precious because every 
stone in it is a jewel of price. It is because the 
state has to do with the children of God in vital 
concerns of their lives that the state becomes 
sacred. A mother in ministering to her child is 
called upon to do many things that in themselves 
may be hard and disagreeable. What does it mat- 
ter, when they are done for her child? The sacred- 
ness of the child makes every act of ministration to 
her child sacred. 


FC 
122 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


This deeper sense of the sacredness of the state 
must lead us to a deeper sense of the sacredness 
of laws. 

Here is where the superficial weakness of the 
democratic state shows itself, but it is also just 
here where we find_its latent strength. 

For there is a mystery of light as well as a 
mystery of darkness, and the mystery of light 
eventually awakens our reverence more than the 
mystery of darkness. Laws that men believed 
were written by the finger of God on tables of 
stone and given by the hand of God into the hands 
of a man, gained men’s reverence if not their obedi- 
ence. When men come to see that these laws have 
been slowly made by men, men trying in dim fash- 
ion to express the will of God for man; and still 
more when, in the developing life of humanity, 
men find that power of making laws in their own 
hands, the mystery of darkness gives place to the 
mystery of light. The power that moves in a 
generation of living men, giving them a new and 
higher thought of righteousness and leading them 
to express it in their laws, is just as mysterious and 
sacred when it moves in the people of a democratic 
state today as when it worked in the law-givers of 
the past. I take it, for example, that the law with 
reference to alcoholic drinks embodied in the 
Eighteenth Amendment to the American Constitu- 
tion, made after years of consideration by the 
deliberate judgments of the American people, is as 


ON THE STATE 123 


much the law of the living God as the laws with 
reference to the goring of oxen, or the digging of 
pits reported to have been given to Moses directly 
by Jehovah amid the thunders of Mt. Sinai. 

But we sorely need this sense of the sacredness 
of law at the present time and we need it most 
right here in America. 

A recent article in the Literary Digest, entitled 
The Most Lawless Nation in the World, gives 
some facts that may well make us stop and think. 
It is not the violation of recently passed statutes 
that is here spoken of, but of what are universally 
recognised as the laws of God and man. Thus we 
are told that in the year 1921 throughout all 
England and Wales there were ninety-five rob- 
beries, while in 1922, in the city of New York 
alone, there were one thousand four hundred and 
forty-five robberies and in Chicago two thousand 
four hundred and seventeen. The record for homi- 
cides is even worse. In the ten years between 1911 
and 1921 the average of homicides per million of 
inhabitants was: in Switzerland, two; in Holland, 
three; in the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec, 
five; in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, 
from four to nine; in Norway, eight; in Spain, 
nine; in Australia and South Africa, nineteen; in 
Italy, thirty-six; in the United States, seventy-two. 
That means in proportion to the population twice 
as many cases of homicide in the United States as 
in Italy, nearly four times as many as in Australia 


124 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


and South Africa, eight times as many as in Spain, 
nine times as many as in Norway, fourteen times 
as many as in Canada, from eighteen to eight times 
as many as in Great Britain, twenty-four times as 
many as in Holland, thirty-six times as many as 
in Switzerland. 

This lawlessness shows itself in us as a people 
wherever the individual comes into contact with 
the law, whether of the nation, the state, or the 
municipality. Apparently there never was a people 
that believed more in the efficacy of laws. There 
is no lack of idealism among us. We see things 
are not as they ought to be and we want, often 
passionately, to make them better; and we pass 
laws that we think will make them better. Per- 
haps there never was another people that made as 
many laws as we do. But we seem to make them 
only to break them. What we lack is such a sense 
of the sacredness of laws as will result in their 
enforcement. Laws are worse than useless if they 
are not enforced. If the democratic state is to 
survive, if the power of making the laws is to con- 
tinue to rest with us, the people, then we, the peo- 
ple, must see that the laws we make are enforced. 
Laws must be sacred things to us, sacred not with 
the sanctity of something imposed upon us from a 
mysterious power outside us but with that of some- 
thing inspired from the mysterious spirit within us 
that through the ages works for righteousness. 

The deepening sense of the sacredness of the 


ON THE STATE 125 


state will show itself also in giving a different 
meaning to the words politics and politician, and 
a different conception of public service. 

Turning to the Century Dictionary we find this 
given as the definition of politics: ‘‘ Politics, The 
science or practice of government; the regulation 
and government of a nation or state for the preser- 
vation of its safety, peace, and prosperity. .. . It 
is the theory and practice of obtaining the ends of 
civil society as perfectly as possible.” 

We are too familiar with the common, very dif- 
ferent use of the word to need to read it in the 
dictionary. 

This debasing of the word has come from losing 
our sense of the sanctity of the thing. On the one 
hand the state has been looked upon by many un- 
scrupulous people as possessing boundless wealth 
and to get gain from the state as perfectly legiti- 
mate. Politics has then come to be regarded as 
the crafty means of securing lucrative offices for 
one’s self or one’s friends. Knowing this, many of 
our best men have avoided having anything to do 
with politics. To go into politics meant to them to 
be more or less contaminated. 

On the other hand, knowing that, except through 
crooked methods, very much more money can be 
secured through business than in public service of 
any kind, very many of our men of greater 
ability and ambition refuse public office in order 
to devote themselves to private gain. The result 


126 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


is that the state is often miserably served be- 
cause its servants are either corrupt, or weaklings, 
or both. 

The remedy for these evils can be found only in 
a deepening sense of the sacredness of the state. 
If the state is as sacred as the Church, then to 
work for the state is as noble as to work for the 
Church. We rightly consider it one of the requi- 
sites of the Christian ministry that a man should 
have the call of God to serve in the sacred min- 
istry of the Church. Equally should men have a 
call of God to serve in the sacred ministry of the 
state. It should be with us in the state as St. Paul 
tells us it was in the Church: “ There are diversi- 
ties of gifts, but the same spirit.”” “‘ God hath set 
some in the Church, first apostles, secondly proph- 
ets, thirdly teachers, then miracles, then gifts of 
healings, helps, governments, divers kinds of 
tongues.” It was easy in the Church for a man 
to believe himself called of God to be an apostle; 
much more difficult to believe that he was called 
of God to be only a “help.” It is easy for a man 
to believe that he is called of God if he is elected 
President, or senator, or governor, or appointed 
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But if a man 
has a due sense of the sacredness of the state the 
same high thought will come to him to give dignity 
to his work and make him faithful in whatever 
post he serves. 

What? Called of God to be a rural delivery let- 


ON THE STATE 127 


ter carrier? Yes! Whynot? Called of God to be 
a tax-collector? Yes! Why not? 

(2) The influence of Christianity on the state 
will be to give us greater confidence in the state; 
and will gradually tend to enlarge the functions of 
the state. 

I am aware that I am here on debatable ground. 
Freely admitting this, I shall not dwell on it, and 
shall try in every way to avoid dogmatising. It is 
not a subject on which anyone has a right to be 
dogmatic, but something needs to be said. 

We must come to have confidence in the state. 
If, as we believe, the state comes to us from God 
and is absolutely necessary in the purposes of 
God for the fulfilment of man’s life, then not to 
have confidence in the state is not to have confi- 
dence in God. It ill behooves us to bring up our 
children to love their country, and bid them at the 
call of their country forsake everything, and if 
need be surrender their lives for her welfare, if the 
state is not worthy of our confidence. To be a 
citizen of a democratic state and lose confidence in 
that state is for us to lose confidence in ourselves. 
If we have lost confidence in the state it behooves 
us to look to ourselves, and ask in what respect we 
have failed in our duty that the state has become 
unworthy of our confidence. As we gain the sense 
of the sacredness of the state and act accord- 
ingly, it will lead us to have greater confidence in 
the state. 


128 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


But the question of the enlargement of the func- 
tions of the state is not the question merely of 
confidence in the state, but in the fitness of the 
state to discharge this or that new function. 

On the one hand, we must remember that the 
state is now discharging many functions which 
were once regarded as outside of its proper do- 
main. The developing life of man, creating new 
wants, bringing what have been the luxuries of 
the few within the reach of the many, has com- 
pelled society to make use of the larger or- 
ganism to discharge adequately these larger 
functions. We see this, for example, in the 
transportation and delivery of the mail, the 
education of children, public sanitation and the 
health of the community. All of these, which 
were once regarded as matters of individual con- 
cern, have come to be regarded as the concern of 
the state, because it is found for the public welfare 
so to do. 

On the other hand, during the late war the state 
was forced by the exigencies of the situation to 
take over and administer many branches of indus- 
try which have been usually left to individuals. 
One result of this is that many are now looking 
to the state to take over and permanently admin- 
ister these and other branches of industry in the 
interest of the public; notably for example, the 
mining of coal, and railroad transportation. It 
will make the greatest difference in trying to settle 





ON THE STATE ? 129 


these matters wisely if we approach them as ques- 
tions of perfectly legitimate consideration, not as 
questions forever settled by the laws of God or 
man. To maintain, for example, that it would be 
foolish and uneconomical, involving eventual losses 
all along the line, for the state to purchase and 
control the coal mines of the country, or the rail- 
roads of the country, is proper and right; as it is 
proper and right to maintain the contrary. What 
is not proper and right, inasmuch as it does not 
in the least help to settle the question wisely and 
well but rather fosters strife and bitterness, is to 
say that it is not an open but a closed question, 
that when the state undertakes to market coal or 
to run railroads it is acting wltra vires and infring- 
ing on the rights of the individual. Questions of 
this sort, and we are absolutely sure to have many 
of them very urgently pressed upon us In the near 
future, must be settled calmly, judicially, experi- 
mentally, with due consideration for the welfare 
_ of the whole community, and the rights of every 
individual. 

(3) There remains the question of the influence 
of Christianity on the state in its relation to 
other states. 

Let us remind ourselves here of two things which 
are fundamental in the inquiry; first, that which we 
have assumed as the central truth of Christianity, 
that man and every man is the child of God; and 
next that the state is of divine institution, neces- 


130 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


sary in the purposes of God for the fulfilment of 
man’s life. 

If all men are God’s children, then those who 
belong to other states are just as much God’s chil- 
dren as those who belong to our state. 

The man who belongs to my state is my brother 
by virtue of our common birthright. The man who 
belongs to another state is equally my brother on 
exactly the same ground. 

When this fact takes possession of the minds 
and hearts of men it tends to produce the attitude 
natural and appropriate between brothers, remov- 
ing suspicion and hate, bringing in trust and good- 
will. If I really believe a man my brother, it will 
not matter whether he is from India, or Africa, or 
Germany, or Japan, or the South Sea Islands; my 
attitude toward him will tend to be that of good- 
will and fellowship. 

That is the inevitable result of real Christianity; 
and if we really believe in Christianity (and I, 
for one, acknowledge that I do so,—that with all 
my heart and soul I believe in Jesus Christ as the 
Saviour of the world,—not only the possible Sav- 
iour of the world, but the Saviour by whom the 
world actually will be saved), then we must believe 
that this result of good-will and fellowship will 
show itself more and more among men. And in- 
fluencing the citizens of the state it will influence 
the relation of the state to other states. 

It is upon this spread of good-will that the 


ON THE STATE 131 


permanent peace of the world must ultimately rest. 
Without this everything else will prove vain. We 
may beat our swords into ploughshares and our 
spears into pruning hooks, but if we have not good- 
will we will forge new swords and fresh spears. 
We may sing ‘“‘ Peace! Peace! ” but if we have war 
in our hearts the songs of peace will change to 
battle-cries. We may hold Hague Conferences, 
and Disarmament Conferences, may reduce our 
navies and minimise our armies, may organise 
Leagues of Nations or even one great world state, 
of which all the peoples of the world shall be citi- 
zens, but if there is not good-will, our scraps of 
paper and card houses will come tumbling down 
and mock us with their futility. 

All of which, rightly understood, but brings us 
back to a more assured conviction that the only 
hope of the world is found in the Gospel of Jesus 
Christ. 

But to go on saying this, and not say some other 
things which are equally true, is the height of stu- 
pidity. It is not through announcing the prin- 
ciples of the Gospel, or even in highly exalting 
them in speech, that the salvation of the world will 
come, but in believing them and applying them. 
The application of them that the world needs today 
is in the relation of the states of the world to 
each other. 

It is here that our belief in the divine institu- 
tion of the state helps us. By “ divine institution ” 


132 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


I mean, of course, that the fundamental instincts 
of man call it into being. 

‘“‘ In those days there was no king in Israel, every 
man did that which was right in his own eyes.” 
Thus The Book of Judges explains the acts of 
lawlessness the book describes. But it also tells 
us the way in which men met those acts of lawless- 
ness, the horror of the crimes, the sounding of the 
trumpet through the land, the gathering of the 
tribes, the punishment of the guilty, the excesses 
of the avengers. Out of this comes the felt need 
of organisation to unite the people in defence 
against their enemies and for the maintenance of 
law and order. 

When I was a boy the window in every cheap 
book-store displayed the dime novel, and on the 
cover of the dime novel was the picture of the 
cowboy of the wild West. What caught the eye 
was the way he was armed; a pistol at his right 
breast, another at his left, another at his hip, and 
another at his side. The bowie-knives sometimes 
outnumbered the pistols. 

The picture told its own story. Property had 
to be protected; each man protected his own prop- 
erty. Life was in danger from violence; each man 
was ready to ward off violence by violence. Dis- 
putes arose as to rights; each man took the settle- 
ment of his rights into his own hands. 

It was not long before this state of things gave 
place to some sort of organisation for obtaining the 


ON THE STATE 133 


desired ends. They found that the individualistic 
method was stupid. Justice often miscarried. 
The wrong man was sometimes killed. The guilty 
went unpunished. The organisation led to the 
state. They had no thought that in this they were 
illustrating the words of Aristotle: “‘ As the state 
was formed to make life possible, so it exists to 
make life good.” They were simply doing the 
thing their reason and sense of right prompted. 

But the state-building instinct goes farther than 
the mere organisation of the community for the 
preservation of law and order. It leads to the con- 
solidation of communities thus organised, into the 
larger group which becomes the state or nation. 

No better example of this can be found than the 
consolidation of the colonies into the nation called 
the United States of America. The story of this is 
so suggestive, and above all so pertinent to the 
condition of the world today that it will pay us to 
consider it carefully. 

To us, looking back over the pee since 
elapsed, realising what Union has meant for the 
thirteen colonies, their expansion into the United 
States of today, knowing in some degree the needs 
of those times, the impoverished condition of the 
people after the long struggle for independence, 
their feebleness even if united, their utter help- 
lessness unless united, the lawless spirit prevailing 
everywhere, the inability of existing authorities to 
preserve order, the sectionalism breeding jealousy 


134 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


and hatred, the threats of civil war, the possibility 
of complete chaos,—to us, seeing these things, the 
consolidation of the colonies into a nation seems so 
natural and rational as to be inevitable under the 
circumstances. It is difficult to imagine the con- 
sequences if instead of the United States of Amer- 
ica we had had thé Balkan States of America. 

Accustomed, too, as we are, to look upon the 
Federal Constitution as perhaps the greatest po- 
litical document of history, with its provisions of 
marvellous wisdom leading to results that have 
blessed humanity, it seems so to carry its own evi- 
dence that the men to whom it was offered for 
their acceptance or rejection must at once with 
unanimity have accepted it. 

How different are the facts of history! 

The Federal Convention which gave us the 
Constitution closed its long and arduous work 
Sept. 17, 1787; and from that day till the accept- 
ance of the Constitution was assured by the vote of 
the New Hampshire Convention, June 21, 1788, 
the ninth colony voting in its favour, every sort 
of abuse was heaped upon the document and its 
framers. The Constitution was denounced as a 
“ triple-headed monster.”” It was nicknamed “ the 
Gilded Trap,” and pronounced to be “as deep and 
wicked a conspiracy as ever was invented in the 
darkest ages against the liberties of a free people.” 
(McMaster, Vol. I, p. 482.) In Philadelphia, 
where the Convention had met, Hamilton and 





ON THE STATE £35 


Madison were declared to be mere boys; Benja- 
min Franklin an old dotard, a man in his second 
childhood. Even Washington was not spared, but 
boldly declared ‘a born fool.” (Fiske’s The Crit- 
ical Period of American History.) 

So far from the adoption of the Constitution 
being unanimous, in the strongest and most influ- 
ential colonies it barely escaped rejection. In 
Pennsylvania it received a respectable majority, 
the vote standing forty-six to twenty-three. But 
in the Massachusetts Convention the vote was one 
hundred and eighty-seven for to one hundred and 
sixty-seven against, so that if of the three hundred 
and fifty-four members voting only eleven had 
changed their votes the Constitution would have 
been rejected in Massachusetts. In New Hamp- 
shire the vote was fifty-seven for, forty-six against, 
so that if only six out of the one hundred and three 
had changed their votes the Constitution would 
have been rejected in New Hampshire. In Vir- 
ginia the vote stood eighty-nine for, seventy-nine 
against, so that 1f six out of the one hundred and 
sixty-eight had changed their votes Virginia would 
have rejected the Constitution. In New York, 
pivotal not so much for its strength as its central 
position, even aiter the Herculean labours of Ham- 
ilton, the vote stood only thirty for to twenty-seven 
against, so that if only two out of the fifty-seven 
had changed their votes New York would have 
rejected the Constitution. Rhode Island was so 


136 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


hostile to the Constitution that it did not even call 
a convention to consider its adoption; and it was 
not till May, 1790, more than a year after the in- 
auguration of Washington, that she became a State 
of the Union. 

Even more important for us to note is the ground 
of the opposition to-the Constitution and the Fed- 
eral Government. It assumed, of course, very 
different forms according to sectional interests and 
feelings; but the underlying ground of the opposi- 
tion was almost always the same. It was the ques- 
tion of State Rights and Federal Powers; what 
rights which the colony possessed should it retain, 
and what should it surrender to the Federal Gov- 
ernment? How might each state retain its sover- 
elgnty and yet in some matters surrender its 
sovereignty? With Rhode Island, for example, it 
was the question of the power of the Federal Gov- 
ernment to raise taxes. Already she had given 
the other colonies a suggestion of her animus on 
the subject. In 1781, when the proposal had been 
made that the Congress should have power to levy 
a five per cent. duty on all imports she had tossed 
her little head and said “that she considered it 
the most precious jewel of sovereignty that no state 
be called upon to open its purse but by the author- 
ity of the state, and by her own officers.” With 
all of them it was the same old question which men 
have had to ask themselves from the beginning of 
time when they have stood face to face with pos- 





ON THE STATE 137 


sible entrance into some larger relation to which 
developing life has called, “How much am I to 
put in, and how much am I to keep out? ” 

Why I have dwelt at length upon this specific 
instance of the birth of a great nation may be 
gathered from these prophetic words of John 
Fiske. In summing up the results of the Federal 
Convention he says: “ Thus at length was realised 
the sublime conception of a nation in which every 
citizen lives under two complete and well-founded 
systems of laws, the state law and the federal law, 
each with its legislature, its executive, and its ju- 
diciary moving one within the other, noiselessly 
and without friction. It was one of the longest 
reaches of constructive statesmanship ever known 
in the world. To Americans it has become such a 
matter of course that they need to be told how 
much it signifies. In 1787 it was the substitu- 
tion of law for violence between states that were 
partly sovereign. In some future still grander 
convention we trust the same thing will be done 
between states that have been wholly sovereign, 
whereby peace may gain and violence be dimin- 
ished over other lands than this which has set the 
example.” 

The Convention our great historian predicted 
has been held. Does America still set the example? 

If anyone imagines that the question of the 
entrance of the United States into the League of 
Nations has been settled by the action of the Sen- 


138 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


ate or even by the Presidential elections four years 
ago, and recently, he misses the mark. Such 
questions are never settled till they are rightly 
settled. 

That there will be at some time in the near 
future something corresponding to the present 
League of Nations, if not taking exactly its form, 
to which America and all the other nations of the 
world will belong, there is among thoughtful people 
very general agreement. It seems plainly neces- 
sary to meet the growing needs of the world. It is 
in accord with what has taken place under similar 
circumstances, so far, that is, as there have arisen 
circumstances similar to the condition of the world 
today. It has been in the visions of prophets and 
seers of all ages. But what has been impossible in 
the past has become possible in the present. Every 
day the world grows smaller so that distance no 
longer separates. It took longer for a delegate 
from Georgia to travel to the Federal Convention 
than it now takes to travel half way round the 
globe. It is not only possible that a parliament of 
the world, at which a delegate from every nation 
of the world should be present, should meet in 
London or New York, and that such delegates 
should be in immediate touch by telegraph with 
their home-governments, but it is conceivable that 
while such a parliament should hold its sessions 
every word of its deliberations should be heard 
through radio service by their congresses or par- 


ON THE STATE 1b 


liaments at home. For the nations of the world to 
keep apart under these circumstances, and not 
come together into some sort of League, or Society, 
or State, for the promotion of peace and the in- 
terests of humanity, would be counter to the whole 
course of human progress. 

More than this: the formation of such a 
League will tend directly to promote that good- 
will without which all merely formal organisation 
will fail. 

Not long since I attended a football game be- 
tween two high school teams, members of one of 
the suburban leagues of Boston. The teams were 
tied for first place, and the game was for the 
championship of the league. The excitement was 
intense, and the young people of both schools ex- 
pressed their feelings as much in the abuse they 
heaped upon the other team as in their enthusiasm 
for their own. One would have thought that the 
other team and their friends were the scum of 
the earth. 

The following week the team that won the cham- 
pionship of that league played the team that won 
the championship of another league for the cham- 
pionship of the district; and now the defeated team 
of the first district and their supporters joined the 
supporters of the team that had beaten them, and 
rooted for them with might and main. The simple 
fact of belonging to the same league changed foes 
to friends. 


140 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


But with us in America the present question is 
not of some possible future league of nations into 
which we may come, but of our attitude toward 
the existing League of Nations. At present our 
attitude toward it is precisely that of Rhode Island 
refusing to enter the Federal Union. The question 
is how long we can continue to maintain this atti- 
tude and keep our own respect and the respect of 
other nations. 

One glory can never be taken from us (pos- 
terity will see to that! ), the glory that the present 
League of Nations owes its being more than to 
any other man, to an American, Woodrow Wilson. 
But it seems to some of us that we have committed 
the sin that Dante has immortalised, the sin of 
him who ‘made through cowardice the great 
refusal.” 

And every day our offense becomes greater, for 
every day the League of Nations is vindicating the 
faith of its founders by its works. 

We must remember that the League has been in 
existence less than five years, and already it em- 
braces in its membership five-sixths of the na- 
tions comprising four-fifths of the people on the 
globe. That, in itself, is an absolutely unparalleled 
achievement. 

And the record of what it has actually accom- 
plished for the good of the world is almost beyond 
our belief. 

The story is too long for us to think of telling 


ON THE STATE 141 


it here. If anyone desires to get hold of the facts 
he can easily do so by writing to the Secretary of 
the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association, 
6 East Thirty-ninth Street, New York. As he 
reads of what the League has accomplished in less 
than five years, of the six wars it has averted, the 
creation of a World Court, the rescue of Austria 
from chaos and collapse, the sending back to their 
homes of hundreds of thousands of prisoners per- 
ishing in Russia, the improvement it has effected 
in world economic conditions, the fight it has main- 
tained against contagious disease and the distribu- 
tion of opium and other habit-forming drugs, the 
diffusion of medical information and the improve- 
ment in health conditions it has wrought all over 
the world,—these and many other things for the 
betterment of human life,—as one reads of these 
accomplishments he is filled with hope. Here is 
indeed an instrumentality by which mighty things 
may be brought to pass for the advancement of 
God’s Kingdom. 

In conclusion I want to present two consider- 
ations which may help us here to a right judgment. 

Many are afraid that the creation of a League 
of Nations will tend to lessen the influence of 
patriotism, we shall be led to sink nationalism in 
internationalism; instead of being loyal to our 
country we shall be drawn away by loyalty to 
some larger aggregation of which our country is 
but a part. 


142 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


This is a very real but by no means a novel 
question. It is a question every man has to face 
all through life. Every time we are brought into 
a new relation of life, a new loyalty is demanded 
of us; and the question arises as to the claims of 
the old loyalty and those of the new. 

A young man marries. Circumstances have 
made father and mother dependent upon him. He 
must be loyal to them, and he must be loyal also 
to the new relation into which he has entered. 

A jealous woman, afraid that in caring for his 
old friends her husband will not care enough for 
her, makes the family life miserable, till she 
learns that he can be loyal to his friends and to 
her as well. 

A minister belongs to a religious organisation, 
his church. As such he must be loyal to its doc- 
trine, discipline and worship. But the time often 
comes when a new vision of truth brings him face 
to face with the question how he can be absolutely 
loyal to truth, and at the same time loyal to his 
church. 

How men like Robert E. Lee felt the tug of two 
loyalties when the question of secession faced 
them; loyalty to the Union pulling one way and 
loyalty to Virginia the other! 

No man can hope to escape the problem. The 
only way he can solve it is by getting this fact 
fixed in his mind, that the effect of every larger 
loyalty is to make us more true to the lesser loy- 


ON THE STATE 143 


alty; for it makes us, to use the words of Professor 
Royce, more “ loyal to loyalty ”’ itself. 

It cannot but be so with the claims of nation- 
alism and internationalism. We must not mistake 
Jingoism for patriotism. That man is no true lover 
of his country who desires to uphoid her at all 
times whether right or wrong. He must love her 
with a love that cares passionately whether she is 
right or wrong, and that if she is wrong will make 
any sacrifice to make her right. But how can she 
be right except as by sympathetic contact she 
learns from other nations, finds their point of view, 
considers their interests as well as her own? 

The question of right, specially as it takes the 
perplexing form of the question of rights, can sel- 
dom be settled from the viewpoint of a single party, 
still less of both parties in a dispute resorting to 
force. A third or fourth or fifth party is much 
more apt to take a juster view. Surely a nation 
wants to learn, not lawlessly lay down the law; 
wants to act fairly, not simply according to its 
momentary judgment or apparent interest. True 
patriotism must will and work for the highest good 
of the fatherland, not for the apparent advantage 
of temporary triumph, that may involve succeeding 
sorrow and shame. That man is most loyal to his 
country who is most loyal to humanity. The best 
school for nationalism the world over today is the 
school of internationalism. 

The other consideration is as to what a nation 


144 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


may be called to give up when it enters the League 
of Nations. 

I shall not approach this question from the 
standpoint of the specific and definite but from 
the standpoint of general principles. This is not 
the time or place to attempt to suggest what the 
United States may have to give up in becoming a 
member of the League of Nations; but I want to 
say what, as it seems to me, is of vital importance 
in the question of giving up anything. 

There is not a new relation of expanding life 
into which a man can enter except through the 
door of sacrifice. 

Man and maid stand before God’s altar to 
enter into the high and holy estate of matrimony. 
They know that it means promotion. The step is 
taken out of expanding life. But it can only be 
taken through the door of sacrifice: “‘ Forsaking all 
others, keep thee only unto her so long as ye both 
shall live.” 

Fatherhood; motherhood; the greatest promo- 
tion that can come to man and woman in life! But 
is there a father or mother that does not know that 
parenthood is bought at a price, sometimes with 
the price of life itself, always with sacrifice? 

A man becomes a partner in a firm, and on the 
instant finds that he has surrendered to the firm 
certain rights in the disposition of what was before 
absolutely at his own disposal. 

I become a citizen of a city, and the tax collector 


ON THE STATE 145 





of that city finds me out, and I must pay my taxes, 
and to the tax collector of that city, and of none 
other. 

A state becomes a part of the nation called the 
United States, and there is a Federal Constitution 
laying down the conditions,—what powers that the 
State once possessed must be surrendered to the 
Federal Government. 

The principle is universal, as applicable to the 
motions of the heavenly bodies as to the life of 
man. If our earth is to remain a part of the solar 
system it must submit to have its movements and 
experiences modified by the moon and the planets. 
Because no man liveth to himself or dieth to him- 
self, to keep his place in society every man must 
surrender something of his sovereignty as an 
individual. 

When, therefore, one objects to America going 
into the League of Nations because it may involve 
sacrifice, the answer is, through what other door 
could she enter into the larger relation of a member 
of the family of states? 

Of course it is possible that the sacrifice de- 
manded may be too costly. I am not here consid- 
ering that question. I am simply trying to show 
the point from which the question must be ap- 
proached, the point from which we in America 
have not yet approached it, the fact that entrance 
into every new and larger relation in life is through 
the door of sacrifice. If there were no sacrifice 


146. THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 





involved in America’s entrance into the League of 
Nations, such entrance would stand condemned as 
running counter to universal human experience. 

Admitting this, one is better prepared to face the 
other question, whether, considering the high pur- 
poses which entrance into the League of Nations 
is designed to atcomplish, the possible sacrifice we 
may be called to make can be esteemed too costly. 
We may differ in our opinions as to this. But all 
will agree that it is good for us to have ever in mind 
what those high purposes are. They are set before 
the world in the opening sentences of the Covenant 
of the League of Nations: ‘To promote interna- 
tional co-operation and to achieve international 
peace and security; by the acceptance of obliga- 
tions not to resort to war, by the prescription of 
open, just and honourable relations between na- 
tions, by the firm establishment of the under- 
standings of international law as the actual rule of 
conduct among governments, and by the main- 
tenance of justice and a scrupulous respect for all 
treaty obligations in the dealings of organised 
peoples with one another.”’ 

For the achievement of such high purposes as 
these it would be difficult to conceive any sacrifice 
too costly. 


IV 


THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 
ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 





IV 
THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 


HE story is told of Charles Lamb that, 

3) looking out of his window one day and 

| (PQ seeing a man on the opposite side of 
oy BS the street, he said to his sister: “I 
d-d-d-don’t, don’t l-l-like that man.” “ But, 
Charles,” said his sister, “why do you say that? 
You don’t know the man.” The reply came in- 
stantly: “I d-d-d-don’t w-w-w-want to know him. 
Then I m-m-m-might have to like him.” 

I am sure this was so with many of us when we 
first heard the expression ‘‘ The Economic Inter- 
pretation of History.” We did not know what it 
meant, and we did not much want to know. Per- 
haps we had been brought up to think of history 
as a constant succession of miracles where the hand 
of God visibly intervened in the affairs of men, as 
when the children of Israel went through the Red 
Sea on dry land. Or perhaps we had been brought 
up on Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero Worship, and 
found the determination of history in the lives and 
work of its great men. But “ The Economic Inter- 
pretation of History”! The expression seemed 
absurd. 





149 


150 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


A little reflection gave us a clearer apprehension 
of the meaning of the words and a juster Judgment 
as to their truth. 

Every one will be amazed to find how much of 
his life has been determined by the question of his 
bread-and-butter. ‘‘ How did you come to live 
just where you de?” If ten of us were asked that 
question nine of us would have to reply: “ It was 
a question of getting my living. I settled in Bos- 
ton, or New York, or Philadelphia, or Iowa, or 
Montana, or California, because I found I could 
better myself by so doing. It was purely a ques- 
tion of bread-and-butter with me.” ‘‘ Why do you 
live in the tenement district? Why do you live in 
such a small house? Why don’t you have a limou- 
sine? Why have you never been to Europe? Why 
are you always so cramped as to the pleasures and 
even the utilities of life?’ A man may hang his 
head like Trotty Veck and feel ashamed that he is 
so poor, but he knows that the causes of all these 
limitations are economic. There is in the life of 
every man a most real and effective ‘“‘ Economic 
determination ” of his personal history. 

The same is true of the history of the race; it 
has had its economic determination. The great 
movements of the race from place to place and 
continent to continent have had economic causes. 
When men were in the pastoral state they moved 
from the plains where the food for their cattle had 
become scant, to the plains where it was abundant. 





ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 151 


Abraham and Lot separate on the question of food- 
supply. Trade is always seeking new markets, and 
farmers virgin soil. The discovery of gold opened 
up California, and men by the thousands flocked 
there to make their fortunes. The Industrial 
Revolution changed the habitat and environment 
of the great majority of the people of Western 
Europe. Everywhere the course of events in the 
lives of nations and of individuals is largely de- 
termined by economic causes. 

Of course we know that in neither case is the 
economic cause the only determining factor. It is 
written, “‘ man shall not live by bread alone.” The 
life of man reaches to something beside the move- 
ments of his body and the supply of its wants. 
There are forces at work in the depths of man’s 
being that determine what is more essential than 
anything which concerns merely the outward man. 
Nevertheless, it is also written, “‘ That is not first 
which is spiritual but that which is natural and 
afterward that which is spiritual.” Put these two 
words of Scripture together and we can not only 
face fearlessly the phrase “‘ Economic Interpreta- 
tion of History,” but learn much from the truth 
it expresses. 

I have said this to throw light upon the impor- 
tance of the subject we are to consider in this 
lecture, the influence of Christianity on our indus- 
trial system. An industrial system we certainly 
have, and an industrial system men have always 


152 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


had. It is one of the great fundamental human 
institutions. It has come into being and gradually 
assumed its present form just as naturally as the 
Church, the family and the state. It has a tre- 
mendous influence not only on the life of every 
man but on the other great human institutions. It 
touches the Church, and sometimes with an in- 
fluence that is baneful in the highest degree. It 
modifies the life of every family in the land. It 
may make or unmake states, for it takes but a 
superficial acquaintance with the facts of history 
to know that the causes of wars are almost always 
almost wholly economic. 

I am aware there are still some to whom this 
question seems very nearly absurd. ‘‘ Our Indus- 
trial System and Christianity,—what possible con- 
nection can there be between the two? The one is 
a question purely of Economics; the other of 
Ethics; and Economics and Ethics have nothing 
whatever to do with each other.” 

More than forty years ago when I first began to 
think as deeply as I could, and to speak as mod- 
estly as I knew how, on these questions, it was 
quite the fashion to speak in this way. It was then 
very generally considered that whatever else was 
the duty of the minister it was emphatically his 
duty to leave business religiously alone. Business 
was one thing and religion was another, and what- 
ever happened they had to be kept apart. 

It certainly is not so to the same extent today. 





ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 153 


Men are everywhere realising that man is moved 
more or less by ethical motives at the very moment 
he is moved by economic motives. It is a plain 
case of what is known in mechanics as the parallel- 
ogram of forces. The Economic force A sets a 
man in motion toward the point A’. The ethical 
motive B, at the same instant sets him in motion 
toward the point B*. The result is, he goes neither 
toward A’ nor B', but toward another point C, 
which lies in the direction both of A‘ and B’. 

The story of human progress and of the stage 
man has reached may be told in a few sentences. 
Man has always progressed, as he walks, by the 
use of two legs, one his sense of what is right, the 
other his sense of what is for his advantage. Some- 
times he puts one foot forward, sometimes the 
other; but in each case the foot behind comes in 
turn to the front, and the body moves forward. In 
the long run men have found that what is right is 
for the advantage of the race, and what is for the 
advantage of the race is right. 

Did men at a certain stage kill their fellow men 
for food? After a time they gave up the practice 
because it was right to do so, and because they 
found better food. For countless ages men fought 
with each other for the possession of trees, or 
caves, or pasturage, or flocks and herds, or at- 
tractive females, and they killed their prisoners 
for the joy of killing. By and by they gave this 
up, because it was right to give it up, and because 


154 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


it paid better to keep their prisoners as slaves and 
make them work. ‘Then another change came. 
The slaves became serfs, not free men and not 
chattels, but half way between, with some rights 
and many restrictions. The change came partly 
because it was for the advantage both of the mas- 
ters and of the slaves, but more because the Son 
of God had come and said to master and slave, ‘ In 
that ye are alike children of God, ye are brothers.’ 
Pushed a little farther and the shackles of the 
slave and the restrictions of the serf were done 
away and men were declared free and equal before 
the law. 

This is as far as man has come. No other 
chapter of human progress is yet written because 
human progress has reached this stage and no 
farther. 

We have not space to consider these facts in all 
their bearings, but they are too significant to be 
passed over lightly. Rightly interpreted, they fill 
us with hope. Let us for a moment focus our 
attention on the substitution of an industrial sys- 
tem founded on free labour for that founded on 
slavery. 

There is no other word which in its meaning and 
history calls up such a feeling of shame and 
horror. Around it cluster the fundamental mis- 
takes, the blunders and crimes and cruelties of 
humanity. Slavery came into existence because 
men believed that work was an evil and a curse, 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 155 


something in every way to be avoided. They 
sought to avoid it as far as possible by imposing 
it on slaves. 
_. The status of these unfortunates in the eye of 
the law is soon told. For generations they had 
none. Even among the Hebrews, where the laws 
were singularly humane and at an early date 
sought to mitigate the rigours of the system, the 
slave was regarded as his master’s money, his 
possession. If the slave died under his master’s 
hand it was not as if a person had been killed but 
as if property had been injured. The Roman laws 
stretched themselves to cover the insignificance of 
the slave and the vileness of his condition as a 
thing, not a person. Their statutes abound with 
such phrases as these: Servile caput nullum jus 
habet. In personam servilem nulla cadit obligatio. 
Nullum caput habet. Servitus morti adsimilatur. 
The horrors of Roman slavery did not show 
themselves in the early days of the Republic, when 
there was virtue and morality, poverty and the 
necessary frugality among the people. The slaves 
were few, and were treated very much as members 
of the family. Indeed the “ father’s right,” which 
embraced the property and lives of all the members 
of the household, placed the wife and children in 
very much the same position as the slaves. But 
when Rome had extended her conquests and, from 
razed cities and ravaged provinces, multitudes of 
captives had been thrust into the shambles and 


156 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


sold in such numbers that they could be bought 
for next to nothing, while at the same time wealth 
and luxury had increased so that the demand for 
slaves kept pace with the supply, then, present 
everywhere, without so much as a question as to 
its right to be, without a statute to put any legal 
restraint upon its abuses, with a debased public 
opinion that permitted any wantonness of cruelty 
and was made more and more savage by daily 
sights of blood and butchery, above all with the 
haunting fear before their eyes that the slaves, who 
outnumbered them many fold, might rise and in 
some measure wipe off the score against them,— 
then slavery showed the depth of misery and degra- 
dation to which it tends to bring both master 
and slave. | 

And if anyone imagines for an instant that the 
horrors of slavery were confined to Roman days, 
let him turn to the history of England and Amer- 
ica in the last century and read what prevailed in 
English provinces till 1833, when slavery was abol- 
ished under the English flag. Or let him read the 
story of the slave-ships that sailed out of New 
England harbours loaded with rum and came 
back loaded with Africans to be sold into slav- 
ery to enrich Southern planters and Northern 
manufacturers. 

But it is much wiser to consider how slavery 
came to be done away than to dwell on its 
horrors. 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM eye 


Slavery was an industrial system begot of eco- 
nomic causes. Of all industrial systems it would 
seem to have offered every advantage to those 
classes in the community who alone had the power 
to maintain or modify existing institutions. Theo- 
retically, slavery is the ideal economic order for 
the capitalist. In it there is no perplexing prob- 
lem of hours of labour, rate of wages, division of 
profits, reasonable conditions, strikes or lockouts. 
The case is simply this: all the product falls to the 
capitalist, who has only to deduct for the main- 
tenance of his slaves as part of his capital what- 
soever portion of the product he may think best 
used for that purpose. What can be simpler than 
this? And what could be considered more absurd 
than any tampering with an institution so natural, 
so firmly established, so economically advanta- 
geousP Yet it is to be most carefully noted that 
just this has taken place. The industrial system 
founded on slavery has been modified, and modi- 
fied so completely that it has passed out of exis- 
tence. It took nine hundred years so to modify it 
that it passed into the intermediate stage of serf- 
dom. It has taken more than eighteen hundred 
years to modify it out of existence into the stage 
of free labour. 

Nor are we in doubt for a moment as to how 
this was brought about. Though economic forces 
have, no doubt, been contributory, it has been 
almost entirely the work of the moral forces of 


158 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


society, particularly as these forces have been in- 
spired and instructed by the teachings of Christ. 
In every way Christianity tended to bring about 
the abolition of slavery. It did so directly. The 
annals of the day may be searched in vain for any 
such words as these: “ I have set such and such a 
slave free from a sense of self interest.””’ They are 
full of such expressions as these: “I have set so 
many slaves free for the love of God.” ‘I have 
set such and such a slave free for the salvation of 
my soul.” Sometimes the language used showed 
a still deeper appreciation of the essentially eman- 
cipating character of the central thought of Chris- 
tianity, and the manumission is made “In the 
name of God the Father Almighty, and his only 
begotten Son who willed to become incarnate for 
this very purpose that He might adopt into the 
liberty of sons us who were held under the yoke 
of sin.” It became a meritorious act to emancipate 
one’s slaves, and Christian men and women vied 
with each other in so doing. Hermes, a prefect 
in the reign of Trajan, was said to have emanci- 
pated twelve hundred and fifty slaves; Chromatius, 
a Roman prefect under Diocletian, fourteen hun- 
dred; St. Ovidius, a rich martyr of Gaul, five thou- 
sand; St. Melonia, eight thousand. (Yanosky, 
page 50.) 

But Christianity did still more by its indirect 
workings. Though it could not at once extirpate 
the customs and usages of ages, it laid its axe at 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 159 


the root of the tree when it proclaimed that in the 
eyes of God the slave was a responsible and ac- 
countable being just as much as his master. But if 
he was so in the eyes of God he must be so in him- 
self, essentially. And if essentially, he should be so 
actually, in the eyes of man, and man’s laws. It 
was this great central truth of Christianity of the 
essential equality of men before God as God’s chil- 
dren, that lifted up the slave into the serf, and the 
serf into the freeman. 

And that is practically as far as we have come. 

Are we to go no farther? 

To one who carefully weighs the facts just pre- 
sented their significance is unmistakable and tre- 
mendous. They fill him with hope as he faces the 
question, what is to be the influence of Christianity 
on our present industrial system. 

‘“‘'Why raise such a question? ” some ask. “Is 
it not admitted that we have reached freedom of 
contract? Is not that a thing of ultimate value? 
Can we go beyond it without marring it? Is not 
the one thing now needed, to push with might and 
main in the path of free contract toward ever larger 
production, giving every man the greatest possible 
amount of freedom in his economic dealings with 
his fellow men, and to keep hands off? Why dis- 
turb the existing order by attempting to thrust 
ethics and religion any farther into the world of 
business? ” 

Our answer is, “ For these three reasons.” (1) 


160 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


The word “ liberty ” may be a misnomer. We want 
to know just what is meant by it. It may be used 
to cover a multitude of sins. (2) The world is be- 
coming more and more convinced in every depart- 
ment of life that better results for all are achieved 
when men voluntarily surrender, if need be, a part 
of their liberty in order to act together for the 
common good. (3) We are beginning to take the 
religion of Jesus Christ seriously, and to realise 
that an economic system which founds itself merely 
upon self-interest, whatever else may be said of it, 
can never with any approximation of truth be 
called Christian. 

(1) It is evident that man wants something more 
than mere “ liberty ” to buy and sell. That may 
amount to practically nothing. He wants life. 

Suppose a man suddenly placed among total 
strangers in a great city where there is every- 
thing to supply his wants and gratify his tastes, 
but where he finds he has not a cent in his 
pocket. He would be absolutely free to purchase 
whatever he needed, but being without means, 
except as he should beg, borrow or steal, he could 
get nothing. 

In hard times there are always instances of men 
who would be willing and glad to sell themselves 
into servitude for the assurance of food and shel- 
ter for themselves and their families. 

It is not simply freedom of contract that men 
want, but life and the wherewithal to live. Free- 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 161] 


dom is to be valued for itself, as an end; but it 
has a higher value as a means to fulness of life. 

The question, then, as to our present industrial 
system is not whether it founds itself on supposed 
freedom of contract, but how real is that freedom. 
Does it deliver men from the tyranny of circum- 
stances? Does it lead to larger life? ‘ By their 
fruits ye shall know them.” Before we can rest 
content with our present industrial system it must 
be tested by its fruits. 

We note in the first place that our present in- 
dustrial system, founded on supposed freedom of 
contract, has been already profoundly modified by 
economic causes, through what is known as the 
Industrial Revolution. This began about 1760, 
and is still in process practically all over the civil- 
ised world. It was the result of the inventions and 
discoveries, most of them made by working men, 
whereby the power first of falling water, then of 
steam and electricity, was used instead of the 
strength of man or animal, and machines contrived 
to do what had been done by human hands. By 
these inventions, in many lines of industry the man 
with the machine (often the man became only a 
boy or a girl) could produce twice, ten times, some- 
times a hundred times as much as before. 

Out of this came two great economic changes in 
production. First, it gave birth to a capitalist 
class. When simple tools were used the workman 
procured and owned them; but when inexpensive 


162 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


tools gave place to exceedingly expensive machin- 
ery, often requiring great buildings to house them, 
much larger amounts of capital were necessary. 
Often no one man could furnish the amount needed, 
and joint stock companies were formed. This gave 
rise to the capitalist class and capitalist produc- 
tion. The change meanwhile in the condition of 
the workman was even more marked. The work- 
man who had owned his simple tools found himself 
utterly unable to compete in production with the 
owner of the expensive machine. He was forced 
to come to him hat-in-hand asking for a job; forced 
to accept whatever wages and work whatever hours 
and under whatever conditions the employer might 
dictate. Under these circumstances it very soon 
became apparent that the liberty which the work- 
man was supposed to have gained in the industrial 
system of supposed free contract had been ex- 
changed for another form of slavery, the slavery 
of economic circumstances. 

The results of these economic changes are too 
well known for us to dwell on them here. 

There is no doubt that the first effect of the in- 
troduction of new forces and of machinery was to 
fill the minds of many with almost boundless hope. 
Water, steam and electricity were to relieve the 
weakness and multiply the strength of men. By 
machinery one man was to do easily the hard work 
of ten. Could there be any greater boon for man? 
Not only the necessaries but the comforts and con- 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 163 


veniences of life were to be produced for all at a 
constantly diminishing cost of human toil. Starva- 
tion, nakedness, squalor, misery and all the dread 
brood that follow penury were to be things of 
the past. 

That is what some men dreamed. There is no 
doubt that the dream might have been realised but 
for the stupidity and greed of man. It would be 
difficult to say which of these is the more to be em- 
phasised, but on the whole we believe it was human 
stupidity. 

The thing worked in this way. Using the new 
methods of production the manufacturers of Eng- 
land found themselves able to produce at vastly 
less cost vastly more goods. But they could not 
sell them at home, because there was no adequate © 
home market. It was not that the goods produced 
were not needed at home. There were multitudes 
destitute of food, clothes, shelter and the common 
necessaries of decent living. But wages had not 
increased and the workers had nothing to buy with. 
In the language of the Economists, there was no 
effective demand at home for commodities. The 
manufacturers were forced to seek foreign markets. 
Thus wealth increased by leaps and bounds, but 
poverty and misery increased equally, till England 
became in the early part of the last century a veri- 
table hell on earth. 

We cannot enter into this story, which has been 
so often told that it has become almost trite, but 


164 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


listen to this description of how the workers were 
often housed, taken from the First Report of the 
Poor Law Commissioners (p. 34): “ Modesty must 
be an unknown virtue; decency, an unimaginable 
thing, where in one small chamber, with the beds 
lying as thickly as they can be packed, father, 
mother, young men, lads, grown and growing up 
girls are herded promiscuously; where every oper- 
ation of the toilet and of nature, dressings, undress- 
ings, births, deaths, is performed within the sight 
and hearing of all; where children of both sexes to 
an age of twelve or fourteen, or even more, occupy 
the same bed; where the whole atmosphere is sen- 
sual, and human nature is degraded into something 
below the level of the swine. It is a hideous pic- 
ture; and the picture is drawn from life.” [Quoted 
by Francis A. Walker in The Wages Question, 
p. 86.] 

It throws light upon this picture as explaining 
the poverty of the people which caused it, showing, 
too, that these conditions were not confined to 
workers in the cities, nor even to workers of that 
generation, if we look into the pages of that re- 
markable book The Land, published in 1913, giv- 
ing the Report of the Land Enquiry Committee as 
to Rural Conditions in England, where exactly the 
same conditions above described are shown to pre- 
vail; and where we find that the average wage of 
the English agricultural labourer is shown to be 
eighteen shillings a week. Think of it! eighteen 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 165 


shillings, less than four dollars and fifty cents a 
week, and that included everything, even to the 
extra money for beer or cider at harvest time,— 
four dollars and fifty cents a week to live and bring 
up a family on! 

But the most effective way to make real to our- 
selves the primary results of the industrial revolu- 
tion is to see them in the parts of the world where 
it is taking place at this very moment, notably in 
India, China or Japan. The story is most graph- 
ically told by Sherwood Eddy in The New World 
of Labour, published a short while ago. The pic- 
ture he gives of what is taking place in that part 
of the world today is an exact reproduction of 
what took place in Europe, but specially in Eng- 
land, one hundred years ago: machinery produc- 
tion taking the place of hand production, capital 
consolidated and everywhere assuming the whip 
hand, the labourers drawn from the country to the 
cities, women and children taking the place of men, 
long hours, abominable conditions, the increased 
death rate, the degradation and demoralisation of 
the workers; and with these the pitifully small 
wages, and almost incredibly large profits. For 
example, the jute mills of Bengal are shown to have 
declared, in 1919, these dividends, and to have 
followed them up in 1920 with dividends almost as 
high and in some cases higher: one company two 
hundred per cent., another two hundred, another 
two hundred, another two hundred, another two 


166 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


hundred and twenty-five, another two hundred and 
fifty, another two hundred and seventy, another 
four hundred and twenty. One of these paid these 
dividends: in 1916, one hundred and ten per cent.; 
in 1917, two hundred per cent.; in 1918, two hun- 
dred and fifty per cent.; in 1919, two hundred and 
fifty per cent.; in 1920, four hundred per cent. 
From these disheartening pictures we turn once 
more to that which fills us with hope. The horrors 
brought by the industrial revolution have been very 
much mitigated. Let it be frankly admitted that 
in some degree this has come about by some of the 
results of the system itself. This admission may 
be made without accepting in the least the claims 
made by the political economists of the Manchester 
School in their teaching as to what they were 
pleased to call the “ Economic Harmonies,” that 
the system of absolutely free contract was bound 
to work eventually, through competition, for the 
good of workers as well as employers by cheapen- 
ing the price of commodities. The thing to be 
noted is that the causes which brought about these 
changes were mainly not economic but ethical. 
Men were brought face to face with the horrible 
state into which the labouring class of England 
had fallen. Things were intolerable. They were 
a stench in the nostrils of decent people. The 
moral sense of the community asserted itself and 
demanded legislation which should do away with 
these horrors. The demands were bitterly opposed 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 167 


by the employing class and the political economists 
who stood back of them demanding absolute free- 
dom to buy in the cheapest market everything that 
could be bought, from hardware to the lives of 
women and children. To the eternal shame of the 
Christian Church the reformers met with but little 
sympathy from the clergy. But the moral sense 
of the community triumphed. 

The history of factory legislation, while bringing 
to light some of the darkest spots in English his- 
tory, discloses some that are most glorious. Be- 
ginning in 1802, with legislation to protect pauper 
children, it came to include all children, then 
women, then all workers. From the cotton mills it 
was extended to mills of every sort, and to the 
workers in mines and on farms. Where at first 
the employer had the sole right of determining the 
hours of labour, so that children from nine to fif- 
teen years of age were frequently employed twenty 
hours on a stretch, from four in the morning to 
twelve at night, and mothers might be seen taking 
their children to print works at midnight in the 
depth of winter, the children crying,—the working 
day came to be regulated by law down to twelve 
hours a day for children, then to ten, nine, eight 
and less. Women, who used to work half naked in 
mines, harnessed like cattle to carts for carrying 
coal, and children, who sometimes as young as six 
were compelled to work long hours in the darkness, 
were taken out of the mines altogether. In the 


168 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


conditions of labour, safety and sanitation came 
to be considered. At first the laws were broken 
or evaded, but increased penalties and the ap- 
pointment of larger numbers of inspectors with 
increased powers, many of the inspectors being 
working men or women, resulted in constantly in- 
creased efficiency in enforcement. All this was 
done against the bitterest sort of opposition on the 
part of the employers and their advocates; but 
it was done, and done through the moral sense of 
the community. 

(2) “‘ Without a vision the people perish.” 

In that remarkable book, The Gospel of Fel- 
lowship, written just before his death, after sum- 
ming up some of the absurdities and injustices 
resulting from our present industrial system, 
Bishop Williams asks: “Is it not enough to 
drive one insane? Could not a Committee from 
Bedlam devise a more rational and _ efficient 
system? ” 

If we believed that things are to continue as 
they are, and that the world, in spite of the bounty 
of nature and the achievements and toil of man, 
is to be always as poverty-stricken as it now is, the 
outlook would be indeed discouraging. In our 
pride we imagine sometimes that we have done 
away the fear of penury. But when we consider 
that in India, where one-fifth of the human race 
live, the average income is less than five cents a 
day; and that in America, the richest country the 


ees oe CC 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 169 


world has seen, the average income is only a little 
over one dollar a day, not enough, even if the in- 
come were more justly distributed, to enable men 
to live as human beings ought to live; and where 
the distribution is as unequal as it now is, with one 
per cent. of the population having fourteen per 
cent. of the income, and one-fifth of the population 
having forty-seven per cent., that is, nearly one- 
half of the income, it is plain that adequate pro- 
vision for the life of the people is not yet made, 
even in America. 

What gives us hope under these depressing con- 
ditions is the conviction not only that they are not 
necessary and in the nature of things, but that they 
are only in the nature of things as we make them, 
and that we know the right way to make them 
different. 

One great step toward this is the application to 
industry of team-play. 

Everyone who has had anything to do with ath- 
letics knows what this means. It means that two 
men working together as a team can not only do 
more than twice as much as one man, but that they 
can accomplish results which are impossible work- 
ing singly. Every game worth the name requires 
team-play to play it successfully. Take even such 
a game as golf. A man may go out and play it all 
by himself, with apparently no thought of team- 
play and only an imaginary opponent, but he soon 
finds that the game requires the most perfect team- 


170 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


play. He plays it with two hands, and in every 
stroke each hand must learn to work perfectly with 
the other so that the result shall be as if there were 
but one hand. Let the right hand or the left hand 
try to do all the work and the stroke becomes a 
failure. If anyone wants to see what team-play 
really means let him watch a perfectly trained 
crew on the Charles River; or, better still, let him 
read Percy Haughton’s How to Watch Football, 
and see how the indispensable lessons of subordi- 
nation of self, co-ordination with others, working 
not as an individual only but as a part of a whole, 
are taught. These run through the whole realm of 
sport. The nobler the game the more team-play 
involved. The more perfect the team-play the 
more successful the team. 

The call in industry today is for team-play. The 
last generation gave us individualism run mad. Its 
word to every man was “ Think of yourself.” Its 
motto in business was ‘‘ Competition is the life of 
trade.” Under it railroads were built for which 
there was no need, costing hundreds of millions 
of dollars. Great factories were erected where 
there were already more than enough to produce 
what was needed. Fabulous sums were spent in 
advertising, every penny of which came out of the 
consumer. The cost of selling an article often 
exceeded the cost of producing, so that the user 
paid more than twice the value of what he bought. 
Gluts in the market came periodically, to be fol- 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 171 


lowed with equal regularity by times when there 
was no hire for man or beast. In cities where 
shoes were made, there were times when you could 
pass through the streets and see shop windows 
crowded with shoes, while the barefooted children 
of the very workers who had made the shoes stared 
shivering through the windows. And why? Sim- 
ply because there was no team-play in industry. 
When we go to war with a foreign foe there is 
team-play enough, for it is recognised that without 
it the nation is likely to perish. There has come 
to be a certain amount of team-play when the com- 
munity fights yellow fever, smallpox, diphtheria or 
tuberculosis; but when we come to fight the com- 
mon foes cold, hunger, nakedness, destitution, the 
miseries that come in a thousand forms from pov- 
erty, we have no thought of team-play. Hence the 
persistence of poverty. It is with us as Tacitus 
tells us it was with the Ancient Britons; Singuli 
pugnant, universi vincuntur. 

Men are everywhere seeing this and therefore 
facing the situation with hope. Under the neces- 
sity and advantages of team-play is the conception 
of the solidarity of humanity, the organic unity of 
society. I need not stop here to show that this is 
a Christian conception. No modern sociologist 
could state it more strongly than St. Paul in his 
letter to the Corinthians: ‘‘ The body is one and 
hath many members and all the members of the 
body, being many, are one body.” “ God hath set 


Wigs THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


the members each one in the body as it hath 
pleased him. And if they were all one member 
where were the body? But now they are many 
members but one body.” What St. Paul says of 
the Church we say, today, of humanity. It is one 
body. America cannot say of Japan, “ We have 
no need of you,” and Japan cannot say of America, 
“We have no need of you.” France cannot say 
of Germany, ‘“‘ We have no need of you,” and Ger- 
many cannot say of France, “‘ We have no need of 
you.” The white race cannot say of the yellow 
race, ‘“‘ We have no need of you,” and the yellow 
race cannot say of the white, “‘ We have no need 
of you.” The labourer cannot say of the capitalist, 
‘“T have no need of you,” and the capitalist can- 
not say of the labourer, “‘ I have no need of you.” 
Never before has this truth been so realised as it is 
today. Men are coming to see that it is a funda- 
mental fact; therefore our industry must be built 
upon it if we are ever to get out of it what the 
world needs. The recognition of it opens up to 
men the vision of redemption from poverty into 
the wealth that belongs to the children of God. 

If anyone asks here whether the appeal for team- 
play in industry is the appeal of economics or of 
ethics the answer is, “Of both.” No doubt to 
some the economic advantages of co-operation will 
make the stronger appeal. To others it will come 
from the ethical imperative. Perhaps it may seem 
an unimportant question. Yet we cannot help 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 173 


thinking here of the words of our Master: “ Seek 
ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, 
and all these things shall be added unto you.” 
Would these words have so profoundly impressed 
men if, instead of the ‘‘xa” that connects the two 
clauses, Christ had said “ ive.” and we should read 
them, ‘‘ Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his 
righteousness in order that all these things may be 
added unto you.” The matter is worth thinking 
about. After all, there is a supremacy in ethics 
that cannot be gainsaid. 

(3) With this in mind we pass to our third in- 
quiry: What influence are the teachings of Christ 
certain to have on our industrial system here and 
now, and more and more; if, that is, we take the 
teachings of Christ seriously. It will show itself, 
I take it, in two ways. 

The first is suggested by what Christ once said 
to some Pharisees who were hoping to find some 
ground for accusing Him and asked Him, “Is it 
lawful to heal on the Sabbath day? ” His answer 
was this question: “‘ What man shall there be of 
you, that shall have one sheep, and if this fall into 
a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it 
and lift it out? How much then is a man of more 
value than a sheep?” (Matt. xii: 12.) 

That was always the thought of Jesus. The 
thing of supreme value to Him was always man; 
not things, not property, not even ordinances or 
institutions, but man. 


174 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


With a strange self-contradiction our industrial 
system has been very slow in learning this. 

“Go to,” it has said, “let us produce wares! 
Ever more wares! Ever wares at a less cost! ” 

‘“‘ But why produce wares? ” you ask; and the 
answer is ready, “ For human welfare, of course.” 

Yet, with this admitted, our industrial system 
persistently subordinates human welfare to the 
production of wares. We look to the influence of 
the teachings of Jesus to reverse this process and 
make the production of wares subordinate to 
human welfare. 

That is the first great lesson our industry needs 
to learn today. 

A few months ago every friend of education was 
thrilled with the great gift of a great business man 
to Harvard College for the recently-established 
School of Business Administration. But he could 
not help asking himself just what use is to be made 
of this great gift. Is the School of Business Ad- 
ministration to teach men simply how to make 
business more profitable, how to diminish overhead 
expenses, how to get raw materials at lowest cost, 
how to get the greatest amount of finished prod- 
uct out of the least raw material, how to get the 
greatest amount of work done at the least ex- 
penditure in wages, how to deal most successfully 
with competitors at home and abroad, and find 
new markets for new wares? If these only, or 
mainly, are to be the purposes sought, it were 








ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 175 


better the five million dollars had been sunk in 
the depths of the sea. 

We often fail to see the true importance of what 
we call business, because we fail to see alike the 
great part it plays in life, and the great purposes 
it subserves. With the vast majority of the human 
race a man’s work is the larger part of the man’s 
life. To it he devotes almost all his waking hours. 
Into it he puts the greater part of his strength. To 
obtain the best results, the work to which a man 
gives so much of his life should minister to his life, 
not simply from the thing he makes or the wage he 
gets, but from the work itself, in the doing of it. 
It must be attractive to him so that he has an affec- 
tion for it. In all cases it must be under conditions 
where life and health are safeguarded; where the 
worker feels he is not ruthlessly sacrificed to the 
mere making of things. 

It is scarcely necessary to show that this is not 
the case in industry at present. Sometimes it 
would seem as if this were the last thing seriously 
thought of. 

It is difficult to believe, for example, that our 
railroads have done all in their power to safeguard 
the life and limbs of their employees when we find 
that for the past ten years the average number 
killed has been two thousand six hundred and 
eighty three, and of those injured over one hundred 
and forty-eight thousand. 

We have become so accustomed to reading in our 


176 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


newspapers of miners buried alive in the coal 
mines, that often we are not interested enough to 
find what was the cause of the fatal explosion 
which led to the tragedy of their living death. 

A fire in a factory by which scores of working 
girls are burned to death excites our indignation 
for a moment,.but our short-lived indignation fails 
to make such holocausts impossible. 

In industries where the materials used are 
dangerous the death rate is allowed to continue 
appalling. 

Go down into the forecastle where the common 
sailor is stowed away, and ask yourself if the hole 
that is given him to sleep and eat and live in is a 
fit lodging place for a human being. 

In countless factories and workshops the deadly 
monotony of their tasks, often leading to paralysis 
while the workers are still young, and leaving them 
as burdens to relations or to the community, would 
seem as foolish as it is cruel. 

Think of child-labour, still permitted in some 
states of the Union, with all it means of loss of 
childhood’s joys, and childhood’s sacred rights to 
nurture and education, with its starving and short- 
ening of life. 

When we consider all these things it does not 
seem as if our industrial system set a very high 
value upon human life, or health, or happiness, or 
welfare or character. 

Where the religion of Jesus Christ is taken seri- 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 177 


ously it will change all this. It begins at the very 
beginning of the trouble by teaching that work is 
not only a good from what it produces but a good 
in itself. Men have staggered too long under the 
weight of that old saying in The Book of Genesis, 
“‘ Cursed is the ground for thy sake: in toil shalt 
thou eat of it all the days of thy life.’ We must 
learn to substitute for it the proud words of Jesus, 
“‘My father worketh hitherto and I work.” The 
man who has not learned the meaning of those 
words and come to find happiness in his work, has 
missed one of the deepest joys of life. The indus- 
try which is not organised and conducted with this 
in view, no matter what profits it pays its share- 
holders or even what wages it pays its workers, is 
a failure. 

This first the Gospel of Christ will come to 
make men see; and in addition to this, everywhere 
and always it will uphold the estimate of Jesus, 
“How much is a man of more value than a sheep.” 
It will inspire the great world of business, that 
vitally touches the life of everyone, with the cen- 
tral truth of the Master’s teaching that because 
men are God’s children their welfare is the thing 
of supreme importance, their welfare at their work, 
their happiness in their work, their education 
through their work. 

But the influence of Christianity on our indus- 
trial system will show itself supremely in bringing 
about the gradual substitution of service instead 


178 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


of profit as the underlying purpose, and in the 
spirit of our industry. 

When Christ said ‘The Son of Man came not 
to be served but to serve,” He tells us very plainly 
His conception of the purpose of human life and 
of the spirit in which life should be lived. But 
industry is a large part of human life. If men are 
to show this in their life they must show it in the 
conduct of their industry. 

More than this and deeper than this. The re- 
ligion of Jesus Christ is the religion of the Incarna- 
tion. This means that it is the religion which seeks 
to express itself not only in conduct and character 
but in fundamental human institutions. It is 
leaven which seeks to permeate every domain of 
human life, and will not be satisfied till the whole 
is leavened. 

The conviction that this central thought of 
Christ must profoundly influence our industrial 
system is taking possession everywhere of the 
minds of those who have the vital interests of 
humanity at heart. 

Theodore Roosevelt spoke many significant 
words, but none more significant than these: 
“Ruin faces us if we decline steadily to reshape 
our whole civilisation in accordance with the law 
of service.” 

By these put these words of Woodrow Wilson, 
taken from his all-too-short but profoundly sug- 
gestive article, written but a few weeks before his 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 179 


death, in The Atlantic Monthly for Aug., 1923, 
entitled The Road Away from Revolution. He 
says: ‘‘ The road that leads away from revolution 
is clearly marked, for it is defined by the nature of 
men and of organised society.” ‘“‘ The nature of 
men and of organised society dictates the main- 
tenance in every field of action of the highest and 
purest standards of justice and of right dealing; 
and it is essential to efficacious thinking in this 
critical matter that we should not entertain a nar- 
row or technical conception of justice. By justice 
the lawyer generally means the prompt, fair, and 
open application of impartial rules; but we call 
ours a Christian civilisation, and a Christian con- 
ception of justice must be much higher. We must 
include sym >athy and helpfulness and a willingness 
to forego se:i-interest in order to promote the wel- 
fare, happiness, and contentment of others and of 
the community as a whole. This is what our age 
is blindly feeling after in its reaction against what 
it deems the too great selfishness of the capitalistic 
system. 

“The sum of the whole matter is this: our 
civilisation cannot survive materially unless it be 
redeemed spiritually. It can be saved only by 
becoming permeated with the spirit of Christ and 
being made free and happy by the practices which 
spring out of that spirit.” 

Surely this is a very significant fact. Here are 
the two greatest men America has produced since 


ee 
180 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


the time of Lincoln; neither of them pessimists; 
both of them distinguished by their clear vision of 
things as they are; both of them with passionate 
devotion to the welfare of humanity; both of 
them students of history, yet men of the present 
and of the future; men with radically different 
temperaments and looking at many things with 
widely divergent views; yet both agree in the con- 
viction that the only hope of whatever civilisation 
we have attained lies in a great moral advance in 
our industry, and that that advance lies in the ap- 
plication to our industry of the law of service. 

What this means it is easy to see, though it is 
impossible to forecast all that it involves. 

What it means may be seen in action in the two 
most notable instances where this principle has 
been applied, our public school system and our 
postal system. Both education and the delivery of 
the mails were at first left almost entirely to pri- 
vate initiative and management, and were under- 
taken for private profit. Here in America both of 
these have been taken almost wholly out of the 
field of private profit, and are maintained for the 
service of the public. With all their faults and 
shortcomings this is everywhere recognised as the 
motive of our public schools. They exist to serve 
the public. They have the tremendous task of 
educating the children of America. They will not 
be satisfied till they have reached every boy and 
girl in America and given them the best that can 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 181 


be given in the way of education. The system 
seeks no profit in this immense undertaking. Its 
aim is simply to serve. 

In the same way with our postal system; its aim 
is service. Recognising the importance of the 
fullest and freest communication between individ- 
uals, the country has entered into the business of 
taking charge of and delivering the mail in the 
interest of all of us; and it is wonderful what it 
will do to serve us. Drop a letter with a two-cent 
stamp on it in the mail-box in New York, ad- 
dressed to a friend in San Francisco, and the post- 
office will deliver it at his door. If the friend has 
meanwhile moved to Boston it will be forwarded 
to his address in Boston, and if by the time it 
reaches Boston he has moved to Portland, Oregon, 
and from there to New Orleans, without the extra 
charge of a single cent it will follow the man to 
and fro across the continent and deliver the letter; 
all because it seeks to serve the man and not make 
profit out of him. 

Is it not likewise conceivable that our railroads 
should be built and run for service, not for profit? 
That telephone and telegraph should be maintained 
for service, not for profit? That coal should be 
mined and delivered for service, not for profit? 
That the great bulk of the commodities men need 
for life and comfort should be made and sold for 
service, not for profit? That the end proposed in 
the manifold activities of agriculture, manufacture 


— eS __ 
182 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


and commerce should not be profit, but service? 
It surely is conceivable that this should be, for the 
dream of it has haunted humanity ever since men 
began to dream dreams and see visions of a brighter 
and better world. 

It is not within the scope of this lecture to 
attempt to sketch even the outline of the changes 
in our industrial system which this change in its 
purpose and spirit will involve. They will be rad- 
ical, for radical changes are needed. But, on the 
other hand, we may be sure that such changes, to 
be of benefit, must justify themselves to our eco- 
nomics as well as to our ethics. As has been said, 
humanity always makes permanent advance on 
two feet. Never far on one. In the long run, what 
is right will show itself for man’s advantage. But 
the right must be rightly done. The right may 
become wrong by being wrongly done. The same 
master who said “ The Son of Man came not to be 
served, but to serve,” said also, ‘‘ Cast not your 
pearls before swine,” and bade His followers “ Be 
wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” 

This points us to the need of the hour. It is for 
wisdom. ‘Those who believe with all their hearts 
that only by the application of the Christian law 
of service can our industrial system be saved, must 
see that it is wisely applied. Applied gradually, 
here and there as industries are able to bear it; 
applied only after thorough consideration of all 
the interests involved, that there be no robbing of 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 183 


Peter to pay Paul; applied radically, reaching to 
the very roots of human industry, but applied con- 
servatively, so that no gains made by the advances 
of the past shall be lost; applied with the abound- 
ing faith in human nature that believes in the solid 
rock of good in man that can be securely built on, 
but never losing sight of the weakness, the folly, 
the selfishness and the sin that are there also. 

This brings me at once to the last words I want 
to say here. I want to speak,—it must be very 
briefly,—of the objection to all this which naturally 
comes to mind. 

Let me state it as strongly as I can. All that 
has been said seems very well, but it is absolutely 
impracticable without a radical change in human 
nature. The only motive which has proved good 
and sufficient in the past to keep the race at work 
and produce effectively has been self-interest. So 
it is likely to remain to the end of the chapter. 
Take away from the individual the sting that 
comes from the fear of want, and the spur that 
comes from the hope of great personal gain, and 
neither will the worker work with all his strength, 
nor will the man whose gift lies in invention or 
organisation use his gift to the uttermost. Human 
nature is made that way. To have different results 
you must first change human nature. Service is a 
thing of the spirit. To attempt to introduce service 
as an effective motive in industry before men are in- 
spired by the spirit of service is worse than absurd, 


184 THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 


it would entail certain disaster. No step, indeed, 
could be conceived more likely to be fatal to the 
advance of the race than to take it for granted it 
would act on unselfish motives and organise in- 
dustry on that supposition, when we know that in 
point of fact in the long run man will not so act. 
The prerequisite, therefore, of all attempts radi- 
cally to change our industrial system in the direc- 
tion indicated is the radical change of human 
nature. 

It is impossible here to answer this objection as 
fully and explicitly as it deserves. I must content 
myself with pressing these two considerations. 

(1) The same objection has been made against 
every advance that has been attempted toward 
social righteousness. It was made when men advo- 
cated the emancipation of the negro: “ The negro 
is not fit for freedom. You must give him the 
nature of a freeman before you attempt to emanci- 
pate him.” When an outcry went up from the 
heart of man against the horrible forms of torture 
and death used as the punishment of certain crimes 
the answer was, human nature was such that fear 
was the only sufficient deterrent. When working 
people have asked that their wages might be in- 
creased or their hours of labour might be short- 
ened, time and time again it has been said: “ They 
will only spend the extra time and money in the 
drinking saloons, such is human nature.” When 
the effort has been made to give to every man the 


ON THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 185 


right of suffrage, the answer has been, such is the 
nature of man that the great majority of them will 
always remain ignorant and sordid, incapable of 
forming any sane judgment as to the common good. 
And what was said as to the nature of women, when 
the battle for woman-suffrage was on, is too fresh 
in our memories to need to be recalled. 

Always the argument has been the same: “ You 
must change human nature before the thing will 
work.” But the advances have come, and the 
verdict of history has been that human nature is 
not so bad as it has been painted. 

(2) But, in the next place, if the facts of the 
case, looked at in the large, were very much less 
encouraging than they are; if the failures of human 
nature to respond to belief in it were very much 
more frequent and disastrous than they have been, 
and the results of trusting in the underlying good 
in human nature much less frequent and note- 
worthy; so that the rate of man’s progress into 
the kingdom of God were likely to be much slower 
than our minds think and our hearts hope, what is 
that to us? If we are the children of God with 
whom a thousand years are as one day, what is it 
to us if what seems to us but a day’s work proves 
the work of a thousand years? The question for 
us is, how much do we believe in Jesus Christ? 
Faith in Christ carries with it faith in man. 


THE END 





tee 1. Ces 
Red ny Foy 


40h uf 








ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES 


Sr ret geen corre nets Semen sorter te Fre agen rec Se rere err oat Eee ania an are mere | 


JAMES J. VANCE, D.D., LL.D. 


God’s Open 


Sermons that Take Us Out of Doors. $1.50 
“Throughout all those brief sermons runs the thought: 
*Man needs a sense of far horizons to save his soul.’ 
. Wance emphasizes the fact that much of the life of 
Christ was spent out-of-doors. He was an open-air 
preacher and His greatest sermons were delivered out-of- 
doors, one on a mountain top, one beside a well. Alto- 
gether helpful and inspiring book.”—Boston Transcript. 


REV. PETER WALKER (Editor) 


Introduction by Thomas I,. Masson 


Sermons for the Times 


By Present-Day Preachers. $1.50 

A thoroughly representative display of contemporary 
ea effort. Sermons by David James Burrell, “pithy 

arkes Cadman, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Newell Dwight 
Hillis, Charles E. Jefferson, Ieander S. Keyser, Francis J. 
McConnell, William Pierson Merrill, William A. Quayle, 
William B. Riley, Frederick S. Shannon, John Timothy 
Stone, and Cornelius Woelfkin. The best work of Amer- 
ican preachers only. 


J. T, VAN BURKALOW, PAD. 


The Lost Prophecy $2.00 


A book for the present hour, claiming the attention of 
all those interested in critical and textual study of Holy 
Scripture. The “Lost Prophecy’ is that referred to in 
Matthew’s Gospel (11: 23) “‘that it might be fulfilled which 
was spoken through the prophets that He [Jesus] should 
be called a Nazarene.” 


WH. L. W ATKINSON, D.D. 
Author of “The Shepherd of the Sea,” ete. 


°,®8 s 
The Conditions of ENTE 

1.50 

“The discourses, in many respects, are models for any 

young minister to-day. The English is faultless, the illus- 

trations apt and abundant, and the thought of the message 

drives home to the heart. The subjects are very practical, 

and such as need to be heard from every pulpit."— 
Baptist and Reflector. 


THOMAS TIPLADY 
Author of “The Cross at the Front,” ete. 


The Influence of the Bible 


On History, Literature and Oratory. $1.00 

“Full of suggestion. Every reader who will thought- 
fully peruse the pages will be sent_back to the Bible with 
a new hope, and will read the Word with fresh vigour. 
Put it into the hands of young men with confidence, feel- 
me Gan its message will go right home.’’—Wesleyon 

ethodist, ! 


BIOGRAPHY AND REMINISCENCES. 


MARION LAWRANCE 


Marion Lawrance: 
The Father of Modern Sunday School Work. 
A Biography by his son, Harold G. Lawrance. 
Illustrated. $4.00 or $5.00 


An inspiration and a practical working tool for all 
Sunday-school workers is this comprehensive life of the 
great authority whom the Sunday School Times designated, 
“the most experienced Sunday school leader of our day.’ 


CHARLES L. THOMPSON, D.D. 
Secretary of the Board of Home pamper: 
Presbyterian Church, U. S. A 


Autobiography of Charles Lemuel 


hompson 
Edited by Elizabeth Osborn Thompson, with a 


Foreword by Vance Thompson. 2.50 

The record of a long, colorful, remarkably full_ and 
useful life, of one of the outstanding figures in the Chris- 
tian activities of the Western world, told with fine modesty 
and admirable restraint. Vance Thompson, the newspaper 
correspondent of international fame, writes the Introduc- 
tion to the Autobiography of his father. 


WILLIAM G. SHEPHERD 


Author of “Confessions of a War Correspondent,” etc. 
Great Preachers as Seen by a 


Journalist $1.50 
Character-sketches from the hand of an_ experienced 
interviewer of a number of prominent preachers: David 
t Burrell, S. Parkes Cadman, Russell Conwell, Har 
merson Fosdick, Charles L. Ei handy ts Bishop Francis 
McConnell, John Timothy Stone, John Roach Straton, 
Christian Reisner, the late Bishop eerie D. Williams, 
and G. Campbell Morgan. 


ELIJAH R. KENNEDY 


The Real Daniel Webster 


Foreword by Judge Frederick Evan Crane, 


New York. Illustrated. .00 

Not only are Webster’s great achievements and the 
manifold richness of his intellectual endowments brought 
out in conspicuous fashion by Mr. Kennedy, but also the 
utter falsity of the many calumnies with which his 
enemies slandered Webster’s name. 


LUCY SEAMAN BAINBRIDGE 


Yesterdays 
“Memories Gleaned from Bygone Years.” 
Illustrated. $1.25 
In a chatty, ag ath jlige\d Mrs. Penaes recalls some 
of the incidents of life, now long removed by the 
passing of the ni yet kept close and green in the 
garden of memory. 








STRIKING ADDRESSES 
ee 
JOHN HENRY JOWETT,D.D. 


God Our Contemporary 


A Series of Complete Addresses $1.50. 


Among the pulpit-giants of to-day Dr. Jowett has been 
given a high place. Every preacher will want at once 
this latest product of his fertile mind. It consists of a 
series of full length sermons which are intended to show 
that only in God as revealed to us in Jesus Christ can 
we find the resources to meet the needs of human life, 


SIDNEY BERRY, M.A. 
Revealing Light $1.50. 
A volume of addresses by the successor to Dr. Jowett 
at Carr’s Lane Church, Birmingham, the underlying aim 
of which is to show what the Christian revelation means 
in relation to the great historic facts of the Faith and 
the response which those facts must awaken in the hearts 
of men to-day. every address is an example of the 
best preaching of this famous ‘‘preacher to young men.” 


FREDERICK C. SPURR 
Last Minister of Regent’s Park Chapel, London. 


The Master Key 
A Study in World-Problems $1.35. 


A fearless, clearly-reasoned restatement of the terms of 
the Christian Gospel and its relation to the travail throngs 
which the world is passing. Mr. Spurr is a man in the 
vanguard of religious thought, yet just as emphatically as 
any thinker of the old school, he insists on one Physician 
able to heal the wounds and woes of humanity. 


RUSSELL H. CONWELL, D.D. 
Pastor Baptist Temple, Philadelphia, 


Unused Powers $1.25. 
To “Acres of Diamonds,” “‘The Angel’s Lily,” “Why 
Lincoln Laughed,” “How to Live the Christ Life,” and 
many other stirring volumes, Dr. Conwell has just added 
another made up of some of his choicest addresses. Dr. 
Conwell speaks, as he has always spoken, out of the ex- 
perimental knowledge and practical wisdom of a man, who 
having long faced the stark realities of life, has been 
exalted thereby. 


GAIUS GLENN ATKINS, D.D. 


Minister of the First Congregational Church, 
etroit, Michigen. 


The Undiscovered Country $1.50. 

A group of addresses marked by distinction of style 
and originality of approach, The title discourse furnishes 
a central theme to which those following stand in rela- 
tion. Dr. Atkins’ work, throughout, is marked by clarity 
of presentation, polished diction and forceful phrasing, 


NEW EDITIONS 


Modern Religious Cults and Move- 
ments By Gaius Glenn Atkins, D.D. 


Dr. S. Parkes Cadman says: ‘‘It is a needed and 
a thoroughly good piece of work. One of the best 
psychologists I know has just read ie and he also 
reports to me its excellence.” $2.5 


Twelve Great Questions pe Christ 
By Clarence E, Macartney, D.D, 
“Simple and direct. You cannot mistake its 
meaning. Courtesy, iar and a passion for 
truth characterize the book. We hope that it will 
have a circulation of just 1,000,000 copies.”— 
Watchman-Examiner. $1.50, 


What Is Success? By Roger W. Babson 


“Mr. Babson answers his question out of wide. ob- 
servation. His book is packed with suggestions 
that ought to turn the feet of many in the right 
direction.”—C, E. World. $1.25. 


The Golden Rule in Business 
By Arthur Nash 


“While true in every detail, Mr. Nash’s story 
constitutes one of the great romances of modern 
industrial life.’—Christian Work. $1.25. 


Pilgrims of the Lonely Road 
By Gaius Glenn Atkins, D.D. 


“Just such a book as might be read with profit in 
our own restless and Sieaceaee gavin age.’”— 
N. W. Christian Advocate. $2.00 


Culture and Restraint By Hugh Black. D.D. 


“Interesting from every point...Dr. Black sup- 
ports a a ilosophy from a mind well stored...” 
imes Review, $2.00, 





Novee: eae Personal Power 
By D. Macdougall King, ME, 


Some vies Se of Psychology as Applied to Con- 
duct and Health. With Introduction by Hon. 
W. L. Mackenzie King. $2.00. 


The ’Round the World Traveller 


By D. E. Lorenz, Ph.D, 
Similar in scope to “The New Mediterranean 
Traveller” it gives in systematic and serviceable 
form “just what the Traveller needs to know’”’ on 
a tour of the world. With 8 maps, 60 illustra- 
tions, etc., $5.00, 


The New Mediterranean Traveller 
With Maps, Plans, Pictures, Etc. $3.50. 


, 7Lt 
OS Reid 
E74, % 
| we oe 


7 i 
1 igi 
by" 


PP 
b 


+ 





Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library 


WLAN 


1 1012 0114 


aes a 
= 


ee ee ee 





ie 
ay 


Ati) 


Ape 
t MALT 


ul 


i 
ih 


t | 
CET fbaae 
RHETT ' 
Ceti 


RT 


i 


Wty 
wide 


Hh 


| 
i 
| 


} 
1 


HMA 


ui 
'} 


alidy he 
ty 











